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Pragmatism as a Way of Life
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The Lasting Legacy of William James
and John Dewey
Hil ary Putnam

Ruth Anna Putnam
edited by
David Macarthur
THE BELK NA P PR ESS OF H A RVA R D U NI V ER SIT Y PR ESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England / 2017

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Copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
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Printed in the United States of America
First printing
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Putnam, Hilary, author. | Putnam, Ruth Anna, author. | Macarthur,
David, editor.
Title: Pragmatism as a way of life : the lasting legacy of William James and
John Dewey / Hilary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam ; edited by David Macarthur.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2017. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016043965 | ISBN 9780674967502 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Pragmatism. | James, William, 1842–1910. | Dewey, John,
1859–1952. | Ethics.
Classification: LCC B832 .P945 2017 | DDC 144/.3–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043965

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CON T EN TS
Standard Editions of the Works of the Classical Pragmatists ix
Introduction by David Macarthur 1
The Insights of Classical and Neo-Pragmatism
1. Taking Pragmatism Seriously 13

Ruth Anna Putnam with a reply by hilary putnam
2. Pragmatism and Verificationism 21

Hilary Putnam
3. What Makes Pragmatism So Different? 36

Hilary Putnam
4. Pragmatism and Nonscientific Knowledge 55

Hilary Putnam
5. Weaving Seamless Webs 71

Ruth Anna Putnam

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vi CONTENTS
6. Rorty’s Vision: Philosophical Courage and Social Hope 87

Ruth Anna Putnam
7. Reflections on the Future of Pragmatism 108

Ruth Anna Putnam
Key Topics in the Pragmatism of James and Dewey
8. Was James a Pragmatist? 123

Ruth Anna Putnam
9. Pragmatism and Realism 140

Hilary Putnam
10. What the Spilled Beans Can Spell: The Difficult and Deep
Realism of William James 159
Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam
11. James’s Theory of Truth 167

Hilary Putnam
12. James on Truth (Again) 188

Hilary Putnam
13. James’s Philosophical Friendships, 1902–1905 201

Hilary Putnam
14. What James’s Pragmatism Offers Us: A Reading of the

First Chapter of Pragmatism 225
Hilary Putnam
15. Varieties of Experience and Pluralities of Perspective 232

Ruth Anna Putnam
16. William James on Religion 248

Ruth Anna Putnam
17. The Real William James: Response to Robert Meyers 261


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CONTENTS vii
18. Dewey’s Central Insight 276

Hilary Putnam
19. Dewey’s Epistemology 293

ruth anna Putnam
20. Dewey’s Faith 314

ruth anna Putnam
Pragmatist Conceptions of Moral Value and Democracy
21. Philosophy as a Reconstructive Activity: William James on

Moral Philosophy 331
Hilary Putnam
22. The Moral Impulse 349

ruth anna Putnam
23. The Moral Life of a Pragmatist 360

ruth anna Putnam
24. Creating Facts and Values 385

ruth anna Putnam
25. Perceiving Facts and Values 405

ruth anna Putnam
26. Democracy and Value Inquiry 421

ruth anna Putnam
27. Democracy as a Way of Life 439

ruth anna Putnam
Appendix: Other Works on Pragmatism by Hilary Putnam and

Ruth Anna Putnam 455
Works Cited 457
Acknowledgments 465
Index 469

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STA NDA R D EDIT IONS OF T HE
WOR K S OF T HE CL A SSIC A L
PR AGM AT ISTS
Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols. Ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul
Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958.
Vols. 1–6 ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (1931–1935); vols. 7–8 ed.
Arthur W. Burks (1958).
The individual volumes, with original date of publication:

1: Principles of Philosophy [1931]
2: Elements of Logic [1932]
3: Exact Logic [1933]
4: The Simplest Mathematics [1933]
5: Pragmatism and Pragmaticism [1934]
6: Scientific Metaphysics [1935]
7: Science and Philosophy [1958]
8: Reviews, Correspondence and Bibliography [1958]
Citations from these volumes will appear in the form:
Peirce, Collected Papers, vol., para.
The Works of William James, 17 vols. Ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers,
and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975–1988.

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x STANDARD EDITIONS OF THE CL ASSICAL PRAGMATISTS
The individual volumes, with original date of publication:

1: Pragmatism [1975]
2: The Meaning of Truth [1975]
3: Essays in Radical Empiricism [1976]
4: A Pluralistic Universe [1977]
5: Essays in Philosophy [1978]
6: The Will to Believe [1979]
7: Some Problems of Philosophy [1979]
8: The Principles of Psychology (3 vols.) [1981]
9: Essays in Religion and Morality [1982]
10: Talks to Teachers on Psychology [1983]
11: Essays in Psychology [1983]
12: Psychology: The Briefer Course [1984]
13: The Varieties of Religious Experience [1985]
14: Essays in Psychical Research [1986]
15: Essays, Comments and Reviews [1987]
16: Manuscript Lectures [1988]
17: Manuscripts, Essays and Notes [1988]
James, Works, vol., page.
The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953, 37 vols. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston.
Produced by the Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898, 5 vols. Carbondale: Southern

Illinois University Press, 1972.
1: 1882–88, Essays, Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human
Understanding
2: 1887, Psychology
3: 1889–1892, Essays, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics
4: 1893–1894, Essays, The Study of Ethics
5: 1895–1898, Essays
The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, 15 vols. Carbondale: Southern

1: 1899–1901, Essays, The School and Society, The Educational Situation
2: 1902–1903, Essays, The Child and the Curriculum, Studies in Logical
Theory

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STANDARD EDITIONS OF THE CL ASSICAL PRAGMATISTS xi
3: 1903–1906, Essays
4: 1907–1909, Essays, Moral Principles in Education
5: 1908, Ethics
6: 1910–1911, Essays, How We Think
7: 1912–1914, Essays, Interest and Effort in Education
8: 1915, Essays, German Philosophy and Politics, Schools of Tomorrow
9: 1916, Democracy and Education
10: 1916–1917, Essays
11: 1918–1919, Essays
12: 1920, Essays, Reconstruction in Philosophy
13: 1921–1922, Essays
14: 1922, Human Nature and Conduct
15: 1923–1924, Essays

The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, 17 vols. Carbondale: Southern
1: 1925, Experience and Nature
2: 1925–1927, Essays, The Public and its Problems
3: 1927–1928, Essays
4: 1929, The Quest for Certainty
5: 1929–1930, Essays, The Sources of a Science Education, Individualism,
Old and New, and Construction and Criticism
6: 1931–1932, Essays
7: 1932, Ethics, rev. ed.
8: 1933, Essays, How We Think, rev. ed.
9: 1933–1934, Essays, A Common Faith
10: 1934: Art as Experience
11: 1935–1937, Essays, Liberalism and Social Action
12: 1938, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry
13: 1938–1939, Essays, Experience and Education, Freedom and Culture,
and Theory of Valuation
14: 1939–1941: Essays
15: 1942–1948: Essays
16: 1949–1952: Essays, Knowing and the Known
17: 1885–1953, Essays
Dewey, ——— Works, vol., page.

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Introduction
The present volume is a collection of a large majority of the writings of

Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam on the topic of pragmatism, especially
along its Jamesian and Deweyan axis. Most of the essays date from the first
decade of the twenty-first century, but some are of earlier provenance: the
earliest of Hilary Putnam’s essays collected here is from 1995; the earliest
of Ruth Anna Putnam’s dates from 1985. Essays on pragmatism omitted
from this collection include those previously appearing in the following
volumes authored by Hilary Putnam: Realism with a Human Face (1990),
Renewing Philosophy (1992), Words and Life (1994), Pragmatism: An Open
Question (1995), and Ethics without Ontology (2004).1 In two of these vol-
umes, Realism with a Human Face and Words and Life, three essays jointly
written by Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam appeared. The present volume
is the first to bring a large body of their previously uncollected writings on
pragmatism together in the same publication. In all there are twenty-seven
essays made up of those written by each author separately as well as two
cowritten essays.
There are several compelling reasons for collecting in a single volume the
writings of Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam on classical and neo-pragmatism.
Let me briefly touch upon them.
1. For a detailed list of the omitted papers see the Appendix.

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2 INTRODUCTION
1. Ruth Anna Putnam is an internationally renowned interpreter of

James’s and Dewey’s visions of pragmatism, James being the most important
single influence on the development of Dewey’s pragmatism; moreover,
Hilary Putnam is a leading neo-pragmatist (the other being Richard Rorty)
and widely regarded as one of the foremost philosophers of the twentieth
century. Having wed in 1962, the authors of the present volume represent a
marriage within a marriage. As Hilary Putnam points out in his “Reply” to
his wife’s “Taking Pragmatism Seriously” (Chapter 1): “Ruth Anna herself
had a great deal to do with my ‘conversion’ [to a broadly pragmatist posi-
tion]” and to an appreciation of what is “of lasting value and vital impor-
tance in the legacy of American pragmatism.”2 To acknowledge the prove-
nance of Hilary Putnam’s neo-pragmatism in the writings of Ruth Anna
Putnam is an indispensable contribution to a proper appreciation of Hilary
Putnam’s mature philosophical outlook, one that he developed through his
“meet and happy conversations” with his wife about the lasting significance
of American pragmatism.3
2. It is worth reflecting that contemporary pragmatist thought is in
somewhat of a quandary: despite the fact that there is an increasing interest
in early twentieth-century or classical pragmatism—to a significant extent
prompted by the neo-pragmatist writings of Richard Rorty and Hilary
Putnam dating from the 1970s—the term “pragmatism” is now used in so
many different ways that one might well despair of seeing any order in the
semantic flux. So Ruth Anna Putnam can muse, “I do not know what it
means today to be a pragmatist,” and she, along with Hilary Putnam, is wary
of adopting the label for their own outlook. Their strategy of taking pragma-
tism seriously is, of course, an attempt to breathe new life into the movement
by re-evaluating what is worth preserving from the pragmatist tradition and
discarding what is no longer of value.
Perhaps the most dominant contemporary trends in the study of pragma-
tism are (a) a renewed effort to mine Peirce’s writings—most notably on
truth, semiotics, scientific metaphysics, and method; and (b) an investiga-
tion of the relationship between classical pragmatism and German idealism,
2. Chapter 1 of this volume.

3. As Stanley Cavell points out, Milton describes a marriage as a “meet and happy
conversation”; see Cities of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004),
49.

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INTRODUCTION 3
particularly the critical philosophies of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel.4

But as the title of a 1997 book by Howard Mounce announces, there are,
speaking broadly, “two pragmatisms”:5 the scientifically oriented metaphys-
ics and epistemology of Peirce’s “pragmaticism,” as he preferred to call it in
order to maintain a separation from what had become of the movement he
inaugurated, and the wider, more humane ‘experience’-based pragmatism of
James and Dewey whose philosophical compass is always pointing toward
moral, social, political, and religious questions and concerns. The present
volume is of great interest because the Putnams’ writings on pragmatism
constitute the most powerful and sustained defense of this James-Dewey
vision in the philosophical literature. This, of course, involves a discussion of
its similarities and differences from Peirce’s outlook, as well as a concern to
distinguish their reading of James and Dewey from the reconstructive read-
ing developed by the other highly visible neo-pragmatist, Richard Rorty.
3. The present volume also represents the Putnams’ defense of pragma-
tism from a more widespread and insidious misreading—one that has
blocked access to the texts of James and Dewey in major philosophy depart-
ments for too long. For many readers, pragmatism is inextricably associated
with a hopelessly inadequate version of James’s idea that “the truth is what
works”—so that, according to conventional wisdom, pragmatists identify
truth with success or usefulness or wishful thinking. This egregious misread-
ing then sets up the pragmatist theory of truth—indeed, pragmatism it-
self—as an object of derision.6 So it is no surprise that here we find Hilary
Putnam providing a detailed defense of the powerful motivations and phil-
osophical sophistication of James’s theory of truth—which is not to say he
does not have his own criticisms of that view (e.g., its overreliance on con-
4. Recent works on Peirce include Cheryl Misak (ed.) Cambridge Companion to

Peirce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Christopher Hookway,
Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For the
connection between pragmatism and German idealism see the project “Idealism and
Pragmatism: Convergence or Contestation?” (2013–2015), organized by Robert Stern:
http://idealismandpragmatism.org.
5. Howard Mounce, The Two Pragmatisms (London: Routledge, 1997).
6. For a representative of such criticism see Paul Boghossian’s review of The
Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand in “The Gospel of Relaxation,” The New Republic
225 no. 11 (September 2001): 35.

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4 INTRODUCTION
sensus, its antirealist treatment of statements about the past). Ruth Anna
Putnam complements this treatment by showing the systematic concerns of
James’s philosophy, exploring the connection between James’s religious com-
mitments and his controversial idea that, sometimes, we have a right to
commit to some truth on passional grounds.
In general, both of our authors are keen to provide (and provoke in their
readership) a just appreciation of James and Dewey against a perception of
them as being curiously underappreciated or slighted in academic philo-
sophical circles. Nonetheless, the Putnams assiduously follow the experi-
mental fallibilist approach of James and Dewey themselves by subjecting the
writings of these champions of pragmatism, as well as many other philoso-
phers and commentators, to searching criticism (e.g., Austin, Bradley,
Brandom, Carnap, Cavell, Emerson, Flanagan, Fodor, Gibbard, Goodman,
Haldane, Harris, Hookway, Lamberth, McDowell, McIntyre, Meyers,
Moody-Adams, Murdoch, Nozick, Quine, Rawls, Rorty, Royce, Russell,
Sartre, Sen, F. C. S. Schiller, Taylor, Weber, West, Westbrook, B. Williams,
and Wittgenstein). Philosophy, as Dewey and the Putnams conceive and
practice it, is “criticism of criticisms.”7
4. Another notable feature of this collection is the sense that both Hilary
and Ruth Anna Putnam have that one can find in the writings of James and
Dewey, in particular, the materials for what Hilary Putnam elsewhere de-
scribes as the “third enlightenment.”8 Like the great Enlightenment thinkers
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, pragmatists want to do justice
to both the scientific forms of intelligibility associated with the rise of the
natural sciences in the modern world and the ideal-involving intelligibility
associated with our various moral and religious images of the world.
According to the Putnams, pragmatism represents a more enlightened en-
lightenment in its unprecedented understanding of the social and experi-
mental character of reason—putatively overcoming apriorism, skepticism,
and scientism—and in its appreciation of the need for philosophy to work
7. Dewey, Later Works, 1:298.

8. The first enlightenment is the birth of Western philosophy in the work of Plato;
the second is the familiar period that is commonly called “the Enlightenment” associ-
ated with such thinkers as Descartes, Newton, Hume, Kant, Goethe, Voltaire, etc.
Hilary Putnam, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002), 96.

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INTRODUCTION 5
practically and constructively toward more fully democratic forms of social

organization as the most intelligent way of addressing urgent human (as
opposed to narrowly metaphysical) problems. Examples of such problems
include the need to rethink the environment as something other than a nat-
ural resource to be exploited; the question of what constitutes humane treat-
ment of immigrants displaced by war; what notion of “health” is at issue in
the egalitarian policy for universal healthcare; and what we mean by (or how
we use) ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ or ‘justice’ or ‘beauty’ in one aspect of our lives
or another. In this sense, pragmatism is “a manifesto for what the two of us
would like philosophy to look like in the twenty-first century and beyond.”9
5. The marriage of minds we find in the output of our two authors is
more than a matter of mutual inspiration and a commonality of vision. Each
articulate their shared pragmatist vision—what we might call their pluralist
democratic experimentalism—in interestingly different ways; ways that allow
for a more powerful articulation than either of them achieves on their own.
Hilary Putnam tends to emphasize the difference between, and interdepen-
dence of, truth and verification, given his own philosophical path from
metaphysical realism to internal realism to commonsense (or “pragmatic”)
realism. A key insight of commonsense realism is an endorsement of a James-
inspired direct realism in the philosophy of perception, a shift in his own
thinking from his internal realist period (and before) that he thinks is re-
quired if one is to exit the traditional antinomy of realism-versus-antirealism
in metaphysics.10 Alternatively, Ruth Anna Putnam tends to stress James’s
pluralism, especially in its religious and moral dimensions, as well as Dewey’s
fundamental move of applying the so-called scientific method of inquiry to
moral and social problems. Time and again in reading this volume of essays
one is struck by the sympathetic synergy between these two different orien-
tations.
6. What, then, are the most important lessons of pragmatism according
to the Putnams? Apart from fallibilism (a difficult idea to explain given the
existence of necessary truths whose denial we cannot currently understand)
and pluralism (epistemological, ethical, aesthetic, political, etc.) and empiri-
9. Chapters 1 and 7 in this volume.

10. This issue is discussed further in David Macarthur, “Putnam’s Natural Realism
and the Question of a Perceptual Interface,” Philosophical Explorations 7 (2004): 167–
181.

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6 INTRODUCTION
cally sensitive experimentalist methodology, the two most important ideas are,
first, the need to overcome the widespread assumption of a fact/value dualism
in contemporary culture and science—a metaphysical assumption that often
finds support from both working scientists and “naturalist” philosophers.
Hilary Putnam provides a powerful epistemological argument against this
dogma, showing that what we call “facts” presuppose epistemic values (e.g.,
simplicity, reasonableness, coherence, Occam’s razor). Ruth Anna Putnam
provides a complementary ethical argument, exploring the reality and factual
basis of moral values in our valuings. Together they make the point that while
it is possible for certain purposes to distinguish some facts from some values
e.g., a scientist might work on building an atomic bomb or synthesizing a
chemical agent without considering the human costs of its military applica-
tion, the possibility of such local and specific fact/value distinctions provides
no support for a universal (or metaphysical) fact/value dichotomy that is pre-
sumed to be fixed and absolute, casting all facts on one side and all values on
the other. In order to stake out their ideas in this difficult terrain, they fight
the twin tendencies toward incredible “realisms” and unlivable “skepticisms.”
The second important lesson is the need for us to take seriously what Hilary
Putnam calls “the agent point of view,” especially when philosophizing. In
light of Ruth Anna Putnam’s work it is, perhaps, more perspicuously thought
about as the ethical point of view—though that needs immediate qualifica-
tion. The difficulty of understanding their teaching is indicated by the fact that
the philosophy of (ethical) value they espouse cannot be plotted on any known
philosophical map. It is like the fabled Terra Australis of early Renaissance ge-
ographers: it is not a form of moral realism (or Platonism or intuitionism), nor
moral skepticism, nor moral subjectivism, nor moral relativism, nor moral
naturalism, and so on. Thus Hilary Putnam remarks, “What we want is an
ethical standard external to the subjective opinions of any one thinker, but not
external to all thinkers or all life.”11 We have no name for this heady mix of
independence and dependence. The present volume is, then, a provocation to
investigate this unique pragmatist vision of value that the Putnams have done
us the great service of uncovering for our serious consideration.
7. Furthermore, the role of the moral philosopher is here radically recon-
ceived. No more is the moral philosopher seen as an expert wielding abstract

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INTRODUCTION 7
and universal moral principles and rules from some imagined position of
authority.12 For the pragmatist writing about ethics does not presume to any
special knowledge or insight or training. Our authors presume no authority
and openly admit that they can do no better than accept that, despite having
limited knowledge, fallible capacities, and disruptive human passions, it is
still worth the effort to engage in philosophical criticism of what we should
do in order to overcome the domination of the poor by the rich, or the weak
by the strong, as well as countering our all-too-familiar tendencies to
self-aggrandizement or complacent and consoling myths. As Hilary Putnam
puts it, the “idea that we must not be afraid of offering our own philosophic
picture, even though we know that our picture is fallible (and based on ‘our
own ideals’) and that it always needs to be discussed with and by others,
seems to me much needed at a time when the image of philosophy as a sort
of final authority still dominates so much moral philosophy.”13
8. It is from this enigmatic ethical standpoint that we should understand
Hilary Putnam’s extraordinary capacity to address the complexities of philo-
sophical debate in ordinary jargon-free language. So, too, the personal en-
gagement of Ruth Anna Putnam’s ‘voice’ and its plethora of real-life exam-
ples: of tragic poverty; or Gauguin’s leaving his family to pursue his artistic
ideals; or the short-sightedness of U.S. government policy decisions con-
cerning welfare; or the extreme intolerance and inhumanity of Nazism. The
quiet simmering passion and confronting plainspokenness of this writing
implicates and involves its readers—who are addressed face-to-face at eye
level as equals in an ongoing conversation akin to the conversations of
Socrates in the midst of some Athenian street or marketplace from within
the very midst of life.14
9. Without a theory/practice dichotomy or a clearly circumscribable
realm of “the moral,” pragmatism becomes an unheard-of way of life that
12. James writes that “there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dog-
matically made up in advance”; see “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” The
Will to Believe, in Works, 6:141–162, 156–157.
14. Ruth Anna Putnam elsewhere remarks, “Moral progress consists largely in the
extinction of ideals of domination and exclusion by ideals of equality and inclusion”;
see “Some of Life’s Ideals,” The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna
Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 282–299, 296.

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8 INTRODUCTION
strives to leave nothing of human significance unaccounted for. Hence the

focus on “experience” in a very rich sense that is a major advance over the
traditional empiricist (but curiously non-empirical!) view of experience as
‘private’ sense data. As Ruth Anna Putnam puts it, “I seek a philosophy that
I do not have to leave behind in the study.”15
The collection is divided into three sections: the first concerns essays that ar-
ticulate the general vision of pragmatism that the Putnams endorse—that is,
the pragmatism they associate with the promise of a “third enlightenment”;
the second concerns specific problems in the interpretation of the writings of
James and Dewey; e.g., James on partial and absolute truth, Dewey on the
relation between knowledge and the known; and the third explicates and
discusses the importance of the ethical point of view from which both James
and Dewey philosophize, as well as defending “the sort of wide democracy
that James and Dewey championed in their day, and that seems to [us] to be
the most important social ideal.”16 Here it is worth recalling Dewey:
Democracy as compared with other ways of life is the sole way of living which
believes wholeheartedly in the process of experience as end and as means; as
that which is capable of generating the science which is the sole dependable
authority for the direction of further experience and which releases emotions,
needs and desires so as to call into being the things that have not existed in the
past. For every way of life that fails in its democracy limits the contacts, the
exchanges, the communications, the interactions by which experience is
steadied while it is also enlarged and enriched. The task of this release and
enrichment is one that has to be carried on day by day. Since it is one that can
have no end till experience itself comes to an end, the task of democracy is
forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all
share and to which all contribute.17
Hilary Putnam sadly passed away on 13 March 2016. He stands as a shin-

ing example of a philosopher for whom pragmatism, in the best Jamesian
15. Chapter 1 in this volume.

16. Chapter 26 in this volume.
17. Dewey, Later Works, 14:229–230.

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INTRODUCTION 9
and Deweyan spirit, was his way of life: a world-renowned intellect who was
humble and kind, open-minded and warmly responsive to other people, pre-
pared to share his wisdom with anyone and everyone in order to bring about
a better tomorrow. In the world of academic philosophy he refused to fixate
(out of fear or fame or pride) on one or more “positions.” No one has a more
opened-up mind. He had the courage and pioneering hope to always think
anew––adjusting his thinking and feeling and valuing to an ever-changing
world. This volume is dedicated with deep affection to his memory.
—David Macarthur

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1
Taking Pragmatism Seriously
Ruth Anna Putnam

with a reply by Hilary Putnam
LET ME SAY , right off the bat, that I do not know what it means today to
be a pragmatist. Richard Rorty calls himself a pragmatist, but I am in-
clined to think that his pragmatism is profoundly different from that of,
say, John Dewey. The key words in Dewey’s philosophy, as I understand it,
are ‘interaction’ and ‘inquiry’; the key words in Rorty’s recent philosophy
are ‘conversation’ and ‘solidarity’. Not that Dewey would not approve of
conversation and solidarity—both are essential to inquiry—but he would
insist that what prompts the inquiry and what must be its ultimate upshot
is experience, that is, interactions between a human organism and its envi-
ronment. I have been puzzled for years why Rorty fails to note the role of
experience in Dewey’s thinking; the word ‘experience’ occurs in the titles
of several of Dewey’s most important later books. Nor is this emphasis on
experience unique to Dewey; we find it as well in the philosophies of Peirce
and of James.
So perhaps I ought to consider another contemporary philosopher, say,
Hilary Putnam. He certainly does not ignore inquiry, and while I do not
recall frequent occurrences of the word ‘interaction’ in his writings, he has
been emphasizing the importance of practice, or the agent’s point of view.
And like Rorty, he frequently refers to the works of one or the other of the
great pragmatists. But Hilary Putnam has said in recent lectures, “I am not

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14 THE INSIGHTS OF CLASSICAL AND NEO-PRAGMATISM
a pragmatist.” He is not a pragmatist, he says, because he rejects the pragma-

tist theory of truth.
So I cannot answer the question “What does it mean today to be a prag-
matist?” I am not sure whether I am a pragmatist or what it would mean to
say that I am one. So I want to change the question. Let me try to say what
it means to me to take pragmatism seriously.
Dewey wrote, in the introduction to Reconstruction in Philosophy,
“Philosophy will recover itself when it ceases to deal with the problems of
philosophers and addresses the problems of men,” where, of course, he
meant by “men” human beings.1 Taking pragmatism seriously means to me
developing a philosophy that will enable us to deal more effectively with the
great problems that confront humanity. I speak of “a philosophy that will
enable us”: who are we? We are not merely philosophers but anyone whose
thinking may be affected directly or indirectly by what philosophers are
writing and saying. The two early articles of Charles S. Peirce that everyone
remembers when they think of the founding of pragmatism were part of a
series of five articles published in a journal called Popular Science Monthly.
Many of James’s famous papers, for example, the notorious “The Will to
Believe,” were addressed to general student audiences. His lectures on prag-
matism were addressed to educated ladies and gentlemen, and his most
widely read and most frequently reissued book, Varieties of Religious
Experience, is clearly accessible to a large segment of the literate public.
Similarly, many of Dewey’s books are accessible to a wide audience. The first
copy I owned of his Human Nature and Conduct, a book on social philoso-
phy, was issued on thin paper and in thin paper covers for the use of mem-
bers of the U.S. armed forces in World War II.
And what are the problems that pragmatism wants us to confront more
effectively? Well, whatever problems we actually have. William James testi-
fied before the Massachusetts legislature when that body considered what to
do about what we now call “alternative medicine.” James suggested that, on
the one hand, the practice of alternative medicines should be permitted; not
to do so would be to block the path of inquiry—but, on the other hand, the
practitioners of those forms of healing should not be permitted to call them-
selves “doctor”—because the patients needed to know whether they were
1. Dewey, Middle Works, 12:46.

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TAKING PRAGMATISM SERIOUSLY 15
consulting a graduate of a medical school or a healer belonging to some al-

ternative tradition. Dewey comes to mind as someone who frequently en-
tered the public arena both as an author and as an active participant. What
is, of course, particularly dear to American academics is his role in founding
the American Association of University Professors in order to protect aca-
demic freedom.
So what does it mean to turn away from the problems of the philoso-
phers? It means to me—and here I am using a phrase from David Hume
rather than the pragmatists—that I seek a philosophy that I do not have to
leave behind in the study. It means, first of all, what Cornel West has called
“the American Evasion of Philosophy,” by which he meant the evasion by
American philosophers of the problematic of Cartesian skepticism.
Peirce rejected Cartesian doubts as paper doubts that could not possibly
stimulate anyone to real inquiry—where real inquiry, scientific inquiry,
presupposes, for Peirce, that there are real things, things that are what they
are regardless of what anyone thinks they are. James pointed out that out
of a multitude of private worlds not even a God could construct a public
common world. And Dewey noted that the question “How can we infer or
construct the external world from our private and fleeting sense data?”
presupposes the very world it presumes to call into question. So to take
pragmatism seriously means to me, first of all, that I don’t question that I
live in the same world with you. It means also that there is no interface, no
iron curtain between me and the commonsense world of what John Austin
called middle-sized dry goods. To take your problems—where you stand as
a representative of humanity—seriously, I must take it for granted that the
toe I would step on, were I not to take care, is the toe in which you would
feel pain.
What I just said suggests already the second problem of the philosophers
that one evades if one takes pragmatism seriously—the problem of other
minds. Here I need to interrupt myself, lest I be seriously misunderstood.
When I say that pragmatists evade the Cartesian problem of our knowledge
of the external world, I am not saying that they have no philosophy of per-
ception; I am saying that their philosophy of perception is not meant to be
a response to skepticism. Similarly, I am not saying that if one takes pragma-
tism seriously one does not work in philosophy of mind or in philosophy of
language, but, once again, one does it neither as a metaphysical realist nor as
a skeptic. One does it taking our commonsense beliefs for granted—taking

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it for granted, for example, that we sometimes think of the same building,
and that we can sometimes communicate this fact to each other, and so we
sometimes succeed in meeting at an appointed time in a certain place.
But this is not the place to elaborate on pragmatist epistemology or prag-
matist philosophy of language or of mind. For the way in which pragmatists
take the existence of other people seriously—and it is, of course, significant
that I say “other people” rather than “other minds”—is more basic. I men-
tioned above that Peirce rejects Cartesian doubt. The other thing Peirce does
in his seminal paper “The Fixation of Belief “ is to examine what he calls
“methods of inquiry” and to reject three of them before he comes to the
scientific method.
What interests me here about Peirce’s comments on these other methods,
methods that do not fix belief as a result of experience, is that he says that
they succumb to the social impulse rather than that they succumb to expe-
rience. Why does he say that? Well, to the extent that one’s beliefs are altered
in the light of contrary experience one is following the scientific method. So
what Peirce is asking is what will move someone from a dogmatically held
belief, a belief which one claims to be immune to falsification, if one is not
willing to count any sense experience as contrary evidence, or if the belief is
such that no sense experience could count as contrary evidence? And his
answer is that it will be one’s coming to see that these beliefs are not shared
by others. Thus, one may have accepted the religious beliefs of one’s commu-
nity until one discovers that other people have different religious beliefs, or
none at all, and that will cause one to rethink these matters. Or one may
have been persuaded by Descartes until one discovers other philosophers
who question Cartesian assumptions.
But this is not just a piece of clever psychology, for two quite distinct
reasons. On the one hand Peirce holds that we cannot defend our beliefs
using the scientific method to fix beliefs and using the probabilities so estab-
lished to guide our conduct unless we are interested not in our own success
but in the success of humanity as a whole or, as Peirce would say, the com-
munity of inquirers indefinitely prolonged. On the other hand, and this
holds whether or not one accepts Peirce’s theory of truth, all pragmatists
insist on the social character of inquiry. What is wrong with the Cartesian
question “How do I know that there is an external world?” is not only that
it reflects an unreal doubt but that it assumes that this doubt can be laid to
rest by a single individual. Of course, if one takes the Cartesian doubt seri-

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ously one would have to take the solipsism seriously as well. But even if one
does not take Cartesian doubt seriously, there are times when one doubts
one’s own objectivity, and only others (and thus one’s trust in these others)
can lay such doubts to rest. Finally, and commonsensically, all our knowl-
edge is built upon foundations laid by our predecessors, and most of our
new knowledge depends on the work of communities of inquirers.
So to take pragmatism seriously is to take oneself to be living in a world
that one shares with others, others with whom one cooperates in inquiry,
others with whom one may compete for scarce resources or with whom
one may cooperate in seeking to achieve common goals. It is to see oneself
not as a spectator of but as an agent in the world. And that means that one
often confronts the question “What is to be done?” In other words, I have
finally come to the problems of human beings. What then does it mean to
take pragmatism seriously when one confronts moral and social problems?
First of all, it means that one does not see a sharp distinction between
moral problems on one side and social or political problems on the other;
every social or political problem is a moral problem. Second, it means that
one does not see a sharp distinction between moral problems and other
problems, or between moral inquiry and other inquiry. A moral problem
is a problem; the same methods of inquiry apply here as in the case of, say,
an engineering problem or a physics problem. In Dewey’s language it is to
reject the distinction between means and ends, to replace it by a means/
ends continuum. Dewey speaks of ends-in-view rather than ends simplic-
iter, for we may discover as we seek to realize our ends-in-view that the
price we would have to pay is too high, that we must modify or even aban-
don our cherished goal. Or we may discover, having achieved our goal,
that we now confront worse problems than before. Think, for example, of
the environmental problems we have created in the process of raising our
standards of living.
Dewey says, more than once, morality is social. That seems obvious—
how could there be morality unless there were people interacting, having
to do with each other, taking an interest, not necessarily benevolent, in
each other? But consider how philosophers have approached morality
since the Enlightenment, since they understood that morality is a human
enterprise. In morality more than anywhere else, we have taken seriously
Kant’s injunction “Für sich selber denken”—think for yourself! Of course,
taking pragmatism seriously does not mean giving up on thinking for one-

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self, on rejecting blind faith in an authority. But thinking for oneself does
not mean “thinking by oneself.” In morality, as in science, inquiry is a co-
operative enterprise. Subjectivity in the sense of giving too much weight to
one’s own interests, or in the sense of taking one’s own perspective as the
only perspective, can be avoided only by engaging with others, with all
relevant others. Finally, and I have hinted at this already, taking pragma-
tism seriously is to reject the fact/value distinction—that is, to deny that
that distinction will bear any ontological or epistemological weight. I have
already indicated that value inquiry is like scientific inquiry; I need only to
add that there is no scientific inquiry that does not involve the making of
value judgments, not only judgments of relevance and reliability, but judg-
ments that something is interesting, is worth one’s while pursuing, etc. To
gesture at just one way in which the fact/value distinction does not bear
ontological weight, I might just suggest that our moral codes (or the im-
plicit norms that guide our conduct), like our scientific theories, are means
by which we find our way in this complex world so full of opportunities
and of dangers; they are, each in its own way, products of human ingenu-
ity, as are our tools, from Stone Age choppers to the latest automated
machine. We do not question the reality of the latter; why should we ques-
tion the reality (call it objectivity) of the former? That’s what taking prag-
matism seriously means to me: to try to philosophize in ways that are rel-
evant to the real problems of real human beings.
Reply
Ruth Anna Putnam’s “Taking Pragmatism Seriously” is a beautiful statement

of almost all the ideas that I take to be of lasting value and vital importance
in the legacy of American pragmatism. I am thrilled that she has put all this
together so persuasively and yet so tersely. It could serve as a manifesto for
what the two of us would like philosophy to look like in the twenty-first
century and beyond.
If I agree completely with the ideas in question today, this was not always
the case, and Ruth Anna herself had a great deal to do with my “conversion.”
Since I have no disagreements or criticisms to voice in this “reply,” I shall
instead devote it to acknowledging her influence on my thought. But first a
brief history of my involvement with pragmatism.

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One of my principal teachers when I was an undergraduate at the

University of Pennsylvania was C. West Churchman (who later edited the
journal Philosophy of Science for a number of years). Churchman was an
atypical pragmatist—atypical in that he knew a good deal about the logic of
statistical testing and interwove this knowledge with a pragmatist rejection
of the fact/value dichotomy.2 I remember Churchman writing on the black-
board the following propositions, which he attributed to E. A. Singer Jr.
(who had been a student of William James and who was an emeritus profes-
sor at “Penn” and a teacher of Sidney Morgenbesser, Richard Rudner, and
myself ):
1. Knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of theories (under which

term Singer included all generalizations). For example, to know that
something is an oak tree is to know that it belongs to a kind of tree,
which generally has leaves with a certain shape, which usually pro-
duces acorns, etc. Here Singer was attacking the idea that science can
“start” with bare particular data and build up to generalizations by
induction and abduction. We always already presuppose a stock of
generalizations when we observe.
2. Knowledge of theories (in the wide sense described) presupposes
knowledge of [particular] facts. (There are no generalizations about
the world we can know a priori.)
3. Knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of values. This is the po-
sition I defend. It can be broken into two separate claims: (i) that
the activity of justifying factual claims presupposes value judgments,
and (ii) we must regard those value judgments as capable of being
right (as “objective” in philosophical jargon) if we are not to fall into
subjectivism with respect to the factual claims themselves.
4. Knowledge of values presupposes knowledge of facts. (Against all
philosophers who believe that [some part of ] ethics is a priori.)
Although this sounds as if I was well launched as a “pragmatist” already as an

undergraduate, in fact I paid little attention to this at the time (I was much
2. Richard Rudner, who was a Churchman student, later published a famous article
explaining this connection: “The Scientist Qua Scientist Makes Value Judgments,” The
Philosophy of Science 20, no. 1 (1953): 1–6.

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more interested in Freud, Kierkegaard, Marx—until I read A. J. Ayer’s

Language, Truth and Logic and became briefly “converted” to Ayer’s view).3
The truth is that, like many undergraduates, I was more interested in discover-
ing what various very different thinkers had said and what they had regarded
as important issues than in formulating a “position” of my own at such an early
stage. And when I went first to Harvard for a year and then to UCLA to do my
graduate work, I fell under the spell first of Quine and then of Reichenbach.
True, I did have one excellent seminar on Dewey’s Logic from Donald Piatt,
but I resisted very strongly the idea that fact and value could be interdependent
at that time—in spite of what Churchman had tried to teach me! (Nevertheless,
what I learned in Piatt’s seminar proved valuable decades later.)
Ruth Anna, however, already had a very high regard for Dewey when we
married in 1962, and over the years her gentle advocacy gradually persuaded
me to take a second look. I had already begun to think that the evaluation
of “facts” depends (as the word “evaluation” already suggests!) on value judg-
ments, as a result of arguments by philosophers of language, including John
McDowell (whom I met in 1976), Iris Murdoch, and Paul Ziff, and in 1980
I began to seriously study and teach the philosophy of William James, but it
was both conversations with Ruth Anna and reading and discussing her pa-
pers on the “seamless web” of fact and value that brought both the idea of
fact/value interpenetration and the contribution of John Dewey to the cen-
ter of my attention.4 Eventually we wrote papers together on both Dewey
and James, and I know that my book The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy
and Other Essays strongly reflects her influence and her example. This “reply”
is a very inadequate attempt to express my gratitude for both.5
3. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: V. Golancz, 1951).

4. See Ruth Anna Putnam’s essays in Chapter 25 (“Perceiving Facts and Values”),
Chapter 23 (“The Moral Life of a Pragmatist”), Chapter 5 (“Weaving Seamless Webs”),
and Chapter 24 (“Creating Facts and Values”) of this volume.
5. See our joint articles not reprinted in the present volume: “William James’s
Ideas,” reprinted in Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1990), 217–231; “Dewey’s Logic: Epistemology as
Hypothesis” and “Education for Democracy,” both reprinted in Hilary Putnam, Words
and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 198–
220, 221–244.

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2
Pragmatism and Verificationism
Hilary Putnam
PRAGMATISM is a very large subject. My aim in this essay is not a survey, and
certainly not an overall evaluation of the movement’s insights and errors.
Instead, I want to examine those insights and errors with respect to just one
issue—an issue which was of central importance to the pragmatists, but by
no means only to the pragmatists: verificationism.
1. The Pragmatist Form of Verificationism and How It Differed

from the Positivist Form
Although textbooks tend to treat pragmatism primarily as a theory of truth

(and to identify it with the theory that the true is what is satisfying in the
long run to believe, a theory that not one of the classical pragmatists actually
held).1 It is important to remember that the principle that the classical prag-
matists actually regarded as basic was Peirce’s so-called pragmatic maxim and
that the theories of truth that Peirce and James advanced were regarded by
1. The pragmatist who is supposed to have held this theory most explicitly is, of
course, William James. For my account of the extremely complicated view that James
actually had, see Chapter 11 (“James’s Theory of Truth”) of this volume.

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them simply as applications of this maxim. Here is the maxim as stated by

Peirce himself:
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearing, we con-
ceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these ef-
fects is the whole of our conception of the object.2
In the paragraph that precedes the statement of the pragmatic maxim, Peirce
identifies these “effects that might have practical bearing” with “sensible ef-
fects.”3 And his application of the maxim in that paragraph (a criticism of
the Catholic doctrine of the “real presence” of Jesus’s flesh and blood in the
Eucharist) shows that he takes the pragmatic maxim to imply that there can
be no difference in conceptions where there is no difference in the sensible
effects that we suppose would obtain if one or the other of those conceptions
were to be correct.
All this sounds very much like the logical positivists’ “verification princi-
ple,” and, indeed, Carnap and Reichenbach assumed that that was more or
less what the pragmatists had been trying to state. Yet there are a number of
important differences between the ways in which the pragmatists under-
stood their maxim and the ways in which the positivists understood the
verification principle.
First of all, although it later moved away from its initial phenomenal-
ism, logical positivism began with the idea that knowledge must be re-
duced to the knowledge (by the subject, conceived of as a single isolated
individual) of sense data, which were initially conceived of as a “given”
incorrigible foundation. The movement was committed to the epistemo-
logical priority of the “Eigenpsychisch” and to “methodological solipsism.”
(As Neurath remarked, it is hard to explain how “methodological solip-
sism” differs from real solipsism.) Secondly, logical positivism began with
the idea that to be meaningful an idea must be capable of conclusive verifi-
cation.4 (In 1936–1937 Carnap described how the positivists moved away
2. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in Collected Papers, 5:388–410, 402.
3. Ibid., 401.
4. Rudolf Carnap, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (Hamburg: Meiner, 1961); unal-
tered reprint of the 1928 text.

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PRAGMATISM AND VERIFICATIONISM 23
from this position—and one sees from his account what a struggle that
took.)5
Such ideas were anathema to the pragmatists from the beginning. As early
as 1868 in his “Questions concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,”
Peirce claimed, “We have no Power of Introspection, but all knowledge of
the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge
of external facts.”6 Moreover, in every one of his writings, Peirce emphasizes
the importance of conceiving of the knowing subject as a community. But
the difference from the positivists is even greater when we come to the issue
of conclusive verification. The positivists began with the idea that the unit of
verification or falsification was the individual sentence. But from the very
first, the pragmatists applied their pragmatic maxim to whole metaphysical
systems and to ethical and religious beliefs as well as to scientific utterances
and theories. Thus it is that William James could write, “In every genuine
metaphysical debate some practical issue, however conjectural and remote is
involved.”7 Thus it is that in his Cambridge Conference Lectures, Peirce
could propose a metaphysical system many of whose assertions one could
not hope to test in isolation, but with the intention that it should (and in
fact it does) make predictions about the geometry of space and about other
cosmological issues; the whole idea is that a naturalistic metaphysics can and
should be confirmable in this way.8 In short, for the positivists, the whole
idea was that the verification principle should exclude metaphysics (even if
they were mistaken in thinking that their own ideas were simply scientific
and not metaphysical), while for the pragmatists the idea was that it should
apply to metaphysics, so that metaphysics might become a responsible and
significant enterprise. There is all the difference in the world between these
attitudes.
5. Rudolph Carnap, “Testability and Meaning,” Philosophy of Science 3 (1936):

419–471, and 4 (1937): 1–40.
6. Peirce, “Questions concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” in Collected
Papers, 5:213–263. The quote (265) is Peirce’s own summary of the upshot of Collected
Papers, 5:243–249.
7. James, Pragmatism, in Works, 1:52.
8. Charles Sanders Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things, ed. K. Ketner, with an
introduction by Hilary Putnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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2. Why We Should Not Accept Verificationism
My sympathy with the pragmatists in this dispute does not mean that I ac-
cept verificationism, even in the very liberal sense in which pragmatism is
committed to a kind of verificationism.9 An example is the following: con-
sider the statement that a physical system of a certain kind (one whose exis-
tence is improbable but not actually excluded by physical laws as far as we
know)—say a system of 100 stars arranged at the vertices of a regular 100-
gon, in a region of space otherwise free of stars—does not happen to exist
anywhere in space-time. It could, of course, be the case that there is some
presently unknown law which we do not know which prohibits such a for-
mation; but this seems unlikely. Let us assume that this is not the case, and
that there is a small finite probability of such a system existing in many dif-
ferent parts of the space-time universe. Especially if the whole space-time
universe is finite, it could nevertheless be the case that such a system just
doesn’t happen to occur. It follows from our present scientific world-picture itself
that there is no way we could know that this is the case if it is. After all, we
cannot have any causal interaction of any kind with space-time regions out-
side our light cone (i.e., with regions such that a signal from those regions
would have to travel faster than light to reach us). There is no point in space-
time from which it is possible for beings who have to rely on physical signals
for their information to survey all of space-time. We can know that there are
some things which are possible (possible according to our scientific
world-picture itself ), but which are such that if they are the case, then we
cannot know that they are the case. If the statement:
(I) There do not happen to be any stars arranged as the vertices of a regular
100-gon (in a region of space otherwise free of stars).
9. This represents a change in views which I held for a number of years; a fuller
account of those views, and of my reasons for giving up some of them—in particular,
verificationism—can be found in my Replies and Comments to C. Hill, “The
Philosophy of Hilary Putnam,” Philosophical Topics 21, no. 1 (Spring 1992), as well as
in my “Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human
Mind” (Dewey Lectures, 1994), The Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 9 (September 1994):
445–517.

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is true, there is no way in which we could know that it is true. Yet to con-
clude from the fact that, in the context of our present scientific world-picture,
(I) has no “consequences that might conceivably have practical bearing”
that are not consequences of
(II) No one will ever encounter any causal signals from a group of stars ar-
ranged as the vertices of a regular 100-gon (in a region of space otherwise free
of stars).
and that therefore (I) and (II) have the same meaning—or, better, that the
conjunction of (I) with our present scientific world-picture has the same
meaning as the conjunction of (II) with our present scientific world-pic-
ture—would obviously be a mistake.
Peirce would almost certainly have responded that, if there are no stars
arranged in this way, then this is something that we could and would find
out eventually if inquiry were indefinitely prolonged. But this assumes (1) that
future time is infinite—something we are no longer willing to postulate, and
(2) that no information is ever irretrievably destroyed—something which
also contradicts our present physical theories (though not, of course, the
physical theories of Peirce’s time).10 Peirce’s own pragmatic maxim rested on
a scientific world-picture important parts of which we no longer accept. (In
view of Peirce’s desire that his metaphysics should itself be testable, the fact
that he was making empirical assumptions should not have bothered
Peirce—given his strong and repeatedly expressed commitment to falli-
bilism, he might have been delighted to find himself refuted in this way.)
This brings me to my real topic: why I believe that, notwithstanding the
fact that we cannot say that conformity to any verification principle, includ-
ing the pragmatists’ “pragmatic maxim,” is even a necessary condition for
meaningfulness (or even a necessary condition for sameness of meaning, for
that matter), there is, nonetheless, an insight in pragmatism. This is a con-
troversial issue, as well as a difficult one, and it will take the remainder of my
time, not, indeed, to do it justice (that would take a much longer essay than
this one), but to sketch the reasons for saying what I just said—that there is
some insight in verificationism.
10. Hawking has shown that there is irrecoverable loss of information in black
holes.

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3. Why There Is, Nonetheless, an Insight in Verificationism
Because the issue is a subtle one, I shall proceed by the method of successive
approximations. Here is a first approximation to an answer: the reason that
there is some insight in verificationism is that there is a conceptual connec-
tion between grasping an empirical concept and being able to recognize a
perceptually justified application of that concept.
Please note that even this first approximation to what I want to say does
not imply a number of familiar if problematic philosophical claims. It does
not imply, for example, that empirical concepts are reducible to perceptual
ones. Indeed, I have elsewhere argued that we should not think of talk of
“objects too small to see with the naked eye” as employing a different mean-
ing of the word ‘small’ than that involved in talk of one observable thing’s
being smaller than another; and the former kind of talk is clearly not bound
up with the kind of direct perceptual verification that is envisaged here (nor
can it be exhaustively analyzed in terms of indirect verification either, but
that is another story).11 It does not imply that perceptual claims themselves
are statable in some language that doesn’t presuppose the existence of “exter-
nal objects”—indeed, I have already pointed out that from the beginning
Peirce insisted that the language in which perceptual claims are stated does
presuppose the existence of external objects. It does not presuppose that
perceptual claims have “nonconceptual content.” All of the ‘Kantian’ points
on which Strawson has insisted (rightly, in my view) are fully compatible
with this claim.
Still, one of the reasons that this is only a first approximation to a correct
story should already be obvious from example (I) above. ‘Group of stars ar-
ranged as the vertices of a regular 100-gon’ is an empirical concept, and (it
seems) we grasp this concept without knowing what would justify its appli-
cation. But that is not quite right. What we do not know how to justify
(what seems to be impossible to justify, as a matter of physical necessity) is a
negative existential generalization involving the concept. But if we were in a
position to refer to something we saw in a telescope by the description “group
of stars arranged as the vertices of a regular 100-gon,” we would know how
to justify that referring use. So even in the case of an empirical concept that
11. Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses,” 505.

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appears in an unverifiable quantified statement, we do know how to verify a

(hypothetical) direct application.
But is this necessarily the case? Can’t we, after all, form an empirical con-
cept whose application we might never know how to verify? For example,
the following:
(D) Group of stars outside our light cone arranged as the vertices of a regular
100-gon.
One approach to this question might be to follow Strawson in distinguish-

ing two ways of thinking about reference. One way (associated with the
names of Frege, Russell, and Quine) is to identify reference with the use of
definite descriptions. The other way, long urged by Strawson himself, is to
insist that there is an epistemologically basic notion of reference (reference
to this tree, that cat, etc.) which is not captured by definite descriptions and,
indeed, cannot be captured by the notions of a language which is constructed
as the “ideal languages” of the logicist tradition are constructed, languages
lacking both tenses and indexical words. The peculiarity of such descriptions
as (D), Strawson might say, is that they precisely cannot be used to refer.
While I am sympathetic to this line, and I feel sure that it could be used
to arrive at conclusions similar to the ones at which I shall arrive, I am going
to take a different tack. The obvious point to notice about such a description
as (D) is that it is built up with the aid of quantifiers and other logical con-
stants out of terms which themselves do have easily verifiable applications
(e.g., ‘regular 100-gon’ and ‘star’). What the existence of descriptions like
(D) shows is that quantifiers and other logical constants extend our concep-
tual powers beyond the range of the verifiable;12 but this does not mean that
we could grasp a language without grasping any terms whose understanding
is intimately connected with verification.
A more serious objection to my first approximation is that there are many
empirical concepts that we grasp, and whose application we are able to ver-
ify, at least under favorable circumstances, but whose application we are not
often able to perceptually justify. I have in mind two sorts of cases: analyti-
cally defined terms, such as ‘bachelor’, and terms with respect to which most
12. Ibid., Lecture III, “The Face of Cognition.”

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of us defer to experts. In the case of ‘bachelor’ the situation is much the same
as with respect to the descriptions just discussed—in fact, the definition of
‘bachelor’ (man who is eligible to be married but who has not ever been
married) involves a negative existential quantifier just as do the descriptions
we discussed (and under some circumstances one can perceptually falsify the
claim that someone is a bachelor—by witnessing the person being married,
although one cannot within a reasonable period of time perceptually verify
that someone is a bachelor). So a second and better approximation would
have to restrict the thesis to terms which are not analytically defined.
Terms with respect to which we defer to experts include both technical
terms in science and such terms as ‘elm’ or ‘beech’ (in the United States, at
least, most people cannot tell an elm from a beech, but anyone who knows
that ‘elm’ and ‘beech’ are the names of common sorts of deciduous trees counts
as understanding them). A third approximation would have to restrict the
thesis to terms which are not under expert control in this way. Still, the great
majority of the terms we employ are neither analytically defined nor such that
we need to call on an expert to advise us in their application in everyday use.
But is it really true, even with these exclusions, that the understanding of
even the most ordinary terms, say ‘chair’ or ‘cat’, is intimately connected
with verification—indeed, with perceptual justification? Here too, subtle
issues are involved. At first blush (and, in the end, the first blush answer is
largely right, or so I shall argue), the answer seems clear enough. Under
normal circumstances, to understand the word ‘chair’, for example, involves
knowing what chairs look like. But what of blind people? Yes, blind people
know how to recognize chairs by touch, and both blind and sighted people
know what it feels like to sit in a chair. Could one grasp the concept of a
chair, grasp our actual ordinary concept of a chair and not some made-up
substitute, and not know what chairs look like or what they feel like or what
it feels like to sit in one? The answer seems to be no.
Moreover, it is not just that normal possessors of the concept know what
chairs look like or feel like, etc.; they also know how to tell that they are in the
presence of a chair by means of these “sensible effects” (as Peirce called them).
In short, they have the practical ability to verify—to verify perceptually—
that they are in the presence of something that falls under the concept in
question. (The reference to being “in the presence” of something is closely
connected with the Strawsonian notion of reference, by the way, which is
why I believe that there is a Strawsonian route to my conclusions.)

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In the end I believe that this is a correct line of argument, but there is an
important objection to it that I have to consider, one that will require a
careful examination of what we mean—or better, what we ought to mean in
philosophy—by speaking of a “conceptual connection” between abilities.
But first a word about my own reasons for being especially interested in this
topic.
As some of you know, for a number of years I defended the principle that
a statement is true if and only if its acceptance would be justified were epis-
temic conditions good enough. While I no longer accept this principle—our
consideration of (I) has shown us how it can have exceptions—I think it is
important to determine the extent to which it holds as well as to point out
instances in which it fails. And what I contend is that, in the case of the great
majority of our everyday assertions, assertions about the familiar objects and
persons and animals with which we interact, truth and idealized rational
acceptability do coincide. The reason that they so often coincide is not, how-
ever, that truth means idealized rational acceptability but that, first, it is
built into our picture of the world itself that these statements can be verified
under good enough conditions (when they are true); and, second, the exis-
tence of statements of this kind is a conceptual prerequisite of our being able
to understand a language at all. (Why this is a partial vindication of pragma-
tism is a subject to which I shall return.)
4. The Revolt against Conceptual Analysis
Although British philosophy appears not to be so profoundly affected as

American philosophy continues to be, I can hardly afford to ignore the fact
that a great many analytic philosophers now reject the entire idea of a differ-
ence between conceptual and empirical truth. This is, of course, explained
by the influence of W. V. O. Quine’s celebrated “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.”
If there is no such thing as a “conceptual connection,” then, a fortiori, I am
mistaken in claiming that there is a conceptual connection between grasping
certain concepts and being able to verify (in certain sorts of situations) that
they apply. To certain philosophers, what I have been writing will appear as
“hopelessly pre-Quinian.”
One can see how profound the influence of this thought of Quine’s is in
the writings of Jerry Fodor—himself an influential thinker, especially among

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philosophers who feel themselves part of the “cognitive science” movement.

In a recent book, which he coauthored with Ernest Lepore, Fodor insists
that there are no “conceptual connections” at all between any concepts; the
very idea of conceptual connection is a senseless one.13 In conversation,
Fodor has indicated that he likewise (not surprisingly, I suppose) sees no
significant epistemological difference at all between a mathematical truth,
say, ‘5 + 7 = 12’ and an empirical truth, say, “Water expands when it freezes.”
Both are simply statements of fact, and both are equally revisable.14
I have been recently reading the work of Josiah Royce, a thinker who is
too much neglected, and one evening I suddenly had the experience of re-
seeing Quine’s celebrated paper, seeing it as Royce might have seen it. My
readers will recall that Quine argued that if there were such a thing as two
terms A and B being “synonymous,” then there would be analytic truths of
the form “x is an A, if and only if x is a B” (Premise One). He argued that in
that case, we would have unrevisable knowledge of the truth of these condi-
tionals. Evidently using an unstated premise of the form: analytic truths, if
such there be, are the sort of truth of which we have unrevisable knowledge
(call this Premise Two). But, Quine argued (and with so much I agree) no
truth-claim is immune to revision; hence, he concluded, synonymy (having
the same meaning) is an unacceptable notion.
Royce considered himself both a pragmatist and an idealist, partly because
analytic philosophy defined itself in opposition to idealism in its very first
moments in 1903 and partly because Royce’s most interesting work appears
in books whose titles seem to have nothing to do with meaning and refer-
ence; analytic philosophers (apart from his student C. I. Lewis) seem never
to have read him.15 But to Royce, Quine’s argument would have seemed a
crazy one. For Royce—who was influenced by Peirce—the statement that
two terms have the same meaning is a statement that involves interpretation,
and for both Royce and Peirce, interpretation is an endlessly revisable process.
13. Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore, Meaning Holism: A Shopper’s Guide (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1992).
14. For a criticism of this view, see my “Rethinking Mathematical Necessity,” in
Words and Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), which also develops
the view of ‘conceptual’ truth urged here in more detail.
15. Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual (New York: Macmillan, 1901), and
Problems of Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1916).

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The leap from “there are conceptual truths” to “there are unrevisable truths”
(this is, of course, where the unstated Premise Two is needed!) is utterly un-
justified.
This is not to deny that Quine’s essay contains an important insight.
Many analytic philosophers did think that conceptual truths were somehow
unrevisably known to us, and against a notion of conceptual truth that car-
ries that consequence, Quine’s essay is a salutary and powerful corrective.
But against what I might call the pragmatist notion of conceptual truth it
has no force at all.
Indeed, even Premise One fails when A and B are words in different lan-
guages.16 Moreover, one must resist the tendency—which Premise One per-
haps exemplifies—to take every claim that something or other is a concep-
tual truth as a claim that some sentence or other is analytic. Certainly it is
unhappy to think of an arithmetical truth such as ‘5 + 7 ≠ 13’ as analytic
(either in the Kantian sense or, less metaphysically, in the sense of being a
“verbal” truth like “all bachelors are unmarried”); but, nonetheless, there is a
significant sense in which we can say that it is a conceptual truth that 5 + 7
≠ 13, namely that we simply do not understand what they would be asserting if
some people were to claim that five plus seven is sometimes thirteen, or that they
had just found out that five plus seven is sometimes thirteen.
Of course, it can sometimes happen that words to which we are not pres-
ently able to attach a sense turn out to have significance. At one time we
could attach no sense to the words “two straight lines can be perpendicular
to a third straight line and still meet at a point” (if intended as a serious
claim and not, say, as a part of a proof by reductio ad absurdum). It took the
invention of a whole new theory—more precisely, of a new kind of theory—
to give those words a sense, that is, to provide them with a use in which we
can see the sense. Once they had been provided with such a use, we could
also come to see that use, that “new sense,” as an inevitable extension of the
way they had always been used—a new sense, in this sense, is not the same
thing as a new meaning. But it is a matter of methodological importance, not
just of sociological fact, that some statements cannot be falsified unless
someone invents a kind of theory, or better, a kind of use of language that we
16. When A and B are in different languages, ‘x is an A if and only if x is a B’ is in

general not a well-formed sentence of any language.

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cannot presently foresee (and that we do not know whether any use of lan-
guage that involves saying that seven plus five sometimes equal thirteen
would be one which we could regard as an inevitable continuation of our
present uses of the words ‘seven’, ‘five’, ‘thirteen’, ‘plus’, ‘equals’, and ‘some-
times’).17
Similarly, when I say that there is a conceptual connection between un-
derstanding the concept ‘chair’ and being able to perceptually verify that one
is in the presence of a chair, I am not talking of analytic truths of the “all
bachelors are unmarried” variety—these bake no philosophical bread and
cut no philosophical ice—but of the limits of sense as we presently experi-
ence those limits in our lives and in our thought. That those limits may, in a
phrase from James, sometimes prove “casual”—that we may, in the future,
see how they could have been transgressed—does not make them philosoph-
ically insignificant or nonexistent.18
5. But Does the Connection Exist?
My point might also be expressed by saying that conceptual truths depend not
only on the interpretation of words but also on the interpretation of ways of
life.19 But even if one grants this, one might still doubt whether the particular
conceptual connections that I have claimed to find are really there. Let us see
if we can really perform the thought experiment of imagining a being who
grasps a concept of the sort that I have been talking about, say, the concept of
a chair, while having no idea of how to perceptually verify that something is a
chair, indeed, no idea of what chairs look like, feel like, etc.
If the being has sense organs like ours and imaginative capacities like
ours, then, even if we introduce the notion by means of a description, if
17. This is a better way to put it, because scientific revolutions do not just produce
new theories; they renegotiate the limits of what counts as a ‘theory’ at all.
18. James writes, “We call those things [Ptolemaic astronomy, Euclidean space,
Aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics] only relatively true, or true within those
borders of experience. ‘Absolutely’ they are false; for we know that those limits were
casual, and might have been transcended by past theorists just as they are by present
thinkers.” Pragmatism, in Works, 1:107.
19. Peirce famously said that man is a sign. Collected Papers, 6:344.

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the being really and truly ‘grasps’ the concept it will acquire the ability to
tell that something is a chair when it does finally see one, or sit in one,
even if has not exercised that ability before. Indeed, if it cannot, then we
will doubt that it has truly grasped the concept. But let us imagine a
being that does not have such sense organs (and whose “mental images”
are not visual or tactile, etc., as ours are). The astronomer Dyson once
imagined intelligent beings whose bodies were gaseous nebuli. Such be-
ings would presumably have concepts of space and time, and be able to
learn the laws of physics; could we teach them to grasp our notion of a
chair by supplying a definition in terms of these highly abstract scientific
concepts?
If the answer is “Yes, we can already attach a clear sense to the notion of
doing that,” then a very large revision will be required in my claim that the
understanding of even the most ordinary term—say ‘chair’ or ‘cat’—is inti-
mately connected with justification. The claim will still be true, if what I
have so far argued is at all right, in the sense that understanding the term
‘chair’ or ‘cat’ will require—both in the case of the Nebulous People and in
our own case—the mastery of some empirical concepts whose use is linked
to perceptual verification, but it will be possible to make large alterations in
the system without removing the understanding of the concept ‘chair’, or
whatever. It will, we are supposing, be possible to understand it by an ex-
plicit description in terms of the fundamental notions of physics, where
those notions themselves can be given empirical content in an indefinite
variety of different ways. Understanding “this is a chair,” “this is a cat,” etc.,
will presuppose the ability to verify some perceptually controlled proposi-
tion or other, but exactly which perceptually controlled proposition will be
a matter about which very little can be said. My first approximation to a
formulation of the insight in verificationism will have been far too “molecu-
lar.” (Although there will have been an insight in verificationism, none the
less, namely that the grasp of concepts requires that there somewhere be an
ability to verify something.) But I shall argue that we need not retreat to
such an extreme holism.
My reasons for thinking that we cannot, in fact, presently make clear
sense of the idea of acquiring the notion of a chair (or whatever it may be)
in the manner just suggested are connected with a remark by the psycholo-
gist Eleanor Rosch, and a remark of Wittgenstein’s. Rosch at one time de-
fended a theory according to which we perceptually recognize chairs by see-

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ing that they have certain “distinctive features”—features which are

themselves supposed to be recognizable without knowing what a chair is. I
was once present at a meeting at which she explained that one of her reasons
for giving up this theory was encountering the beanbag chair. “My subjects
didn’t recognize a beanbag chair as a chair by seeing that it had a back,” she
said; “they recognized that it had a back because they recognized it as a
chair.”
Rosch’s remark leads naturally into Wittgenstein’s remark. Wittgenstein
discussed the word ‘game’, writing: “One might say that the concept ‘game’
is a concept with blurred edges. But is a blurred concept a concept at all?—Is
an indistinct photograph a photograph of a person at all? Is it even always an
advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct
one often exactly what we need?”20 To replace a concept with blurred edges
by a rigidly limited concept is not to analyze the original concept but to re-
place it with a different concept.21 If we imagine defining ‘chair’ in terms of
geometrical and physical primitives we are imagining replacing the concept
‘chair’ by a very different concept.
Or could we proceed in the following way? We describe one or two
examples of chairs, and then say that ‘chair’ applies to anything which
is “sufficiently similar.” But then we need to suppose that the Nebulous
People have a term that we can translate as “sufficiently similar” and
that the objects they count as “similar” are just the objects we count as
similar, notwithstanding the different natural histories, the fact that
they know our objects only through mathematico-physical descriptions,
etc!
Moral: we can make no clear sense of the idea of grasping these familiar
concepts apart from possessing the appropriate perceptual verification abili-
ties. If this seems too loose a status to justify speaking of the statement that
grasping such concepts requires some ability to perceptually verify the pres-
ence of the object as a “conceptual truth,” then call it a “hinge proposition”
20. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), §71.
21. “I can give the concept ‘number’ rigid limits . . . that is, use the word ‘number’
for a rigidly limited concept, but I can also use it so that the extension of the concept
is not closed by a frontier.” Ibid., §68.

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if you like.22 I suggest that what has been called “conceptual analysis” is best
(re)conceived of as the description of the hinges on which the very under-
standing of our language turns.
6. But What Does This All Have to Do with Pragmatism?
I want to close with a word about the respects in which this is a partial vin-
dication of pragmatism. What I have defended is the idea that our grasp of
empirical concepts depends on our perceptual verification abilities.
I have emphasized that on the pragmatist picture perceptual verification
is not identified with knowledge of private objects and also does not involve
any sort of incorrigibility. To round out even this very preliminary examina-
tion of the pragmatic maxim, I need to mention one further fact. From the
earliest discussions in “The Metaphysical Club” in which Peirce, James,
Chauncey Wright, and others participated, the idea of ‘belief ’ as simply a
freestanding mental ability was resolutely opposed. The pragmatists one and
all saw beliefs as complex and multitracked habits of action. What is insight
and what is error in that formulation would require another essay at least as
long as this one! But certainly at least this much deserves to be listed on the
‘insight’ side of the ledger: a belief, even the belief that I am seeing a chair, is
not a self-identifying mental state. What identifies it as the belief that it is,
at least in part, is its connection with action—including, of course, further
intellectual action. The insistence, not just on the interdependence of our
grasp of truth-claims and our grasp of verification but also on the interde-
pendence of our conceptual abilities and our practical abilities, is at the heart
of pragmatism. Given the profound originality of their vision, it is hardly to
be wondered if the pragmatists sometimes depicted the relationships be-
tween these various abilities as simpler than they actually are. But they were
profoundly right in supposing that it is an important task of philosophy to
explore and describe their interdependence.
22. The comparison of propositions on which the language game turns to ‘hinges’
comes, of course, from Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. and ed. G. E. M.
Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), §342.

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3
What Makes Pragmatism

So Different?
Hilary Putnam
AS THE TITLE of this essay indicates, my concern will be with the ways in
which pragmatism is a unique metaphysical tradition. This is something I
have written about before, but in many quarters the idea still persists that
pragmatism must be either the denial (à la Rorty) that there is such a thing
as an objectively warranted idea or, on the other hand, just an outdated early
twentieth-century American movement with no real importance today.1 To
show that it is neither of these, I propose to compare pragmatism with, on
the one hand, the materialism or “naturalism” which dominates the thinking
of most analytic philosophers who do metaphysics and epistemology today
and, on the other hand, the traditional understanding (which goes back to
Aristotle) of what “metaphysics” is supposed to be. At the conclusion of this
essay I shall also say a few words about the respects in which pragmatism also
differs from European existentialism, a movement which shares pragma-
1. This essay is a precursor to “The Uniqueness of Pragmatism,” Think: Philosophy

for Everyone 8 (Autumn 2004): 89–106. See also my Pragmatism: An Open Question
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Rorty writes, “I view warrant as a sociological matter, to be
ascertained by observing the reception of S’s statement by her peers.” “Putnam and the
Relativist Menace,” Journal of Philosophy 90, no. 9 (September 1993): 443–461, 449.
Strangely, he objects—in the same essay!—to being called a relativist.

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WHAT MAKES PRAGMATISM SO DIFFERENT? 37
tism’s aspiration to break loose from the traditional project of metaphysics,

without (pace Rorty and Brandom) falling into relativism or nihilism.2
1. Materialism
Today a large majority of analytic philosophers call themselves “naturalists.”

Although the term ‘naturalism’ was frequently used by John Dewey, Dewey
did not mean by it either materialism or reductionism, as he made clear
when he wrote: “The obnoxious quality of materialism is due to its depres-
sion of thought which is treated as an illusion or at most an accidental
by-product.”3 But what today’s “naturalists” mean by the word is a sophis-
ticated (or “post-Quinian”) materialism, and not merely the rejection of
appeals to supernatural entities in philosophy. (For that reason, I shall usu-
ally refer to them in what follows as “materialists.”)
The most sophisticated naturalist-cum-materialist of the last fifty years was
not Quine, however, but the late Bernard Williams (who was, to be sure,
deeply influenced by Quine).4 Williams’s most famous claim was that ideally a
completed physics—and only a completed physics—can give us a complete
and maximally nonperspectival view of the world as it is in itself (or as he pre-
2. Robert Brandom shares Rorty’s view that the pragmatists simply identified truth
with belief that satisfies the desires of the believer. In my reply to Brandom, I show that
this interpretation is “text free”—that is, it simply ignores what the pragmatists actu-
ally said. See “Comment on Robert Brandom’s Paper,” in Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism
and Realism, ed. James Conant and Urszula M. Zeglen (New York: Routledge, 2002),
59–65.
3. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, in Later Works, 4:88 (emphasis added).
4. Bernard Williams’s views were set out at most length in Descartes: The Project of
Pure Enquiry (Hammondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1978), and Ethics and the
Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985). I criticized Williams’s views in Realism
with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), “Bernard
Williams and the Absolute Conception of the World,” in Renewing Philosophy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), and Words and Life, ed. James
Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Williams replied to these
criticisms in “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline,” Philosophy 75 (2000): 477–
496. I replied to this response in “Reply to Bernard Williams’s ‘Philosophy as a
Humanistic Discipline,’” Philosophy 76, no. 4 (October 2001): 605–614.

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ferred to say, “as it is anyway”). He called this hypothetical completed physics

“the absolute conception of the world.” The reason I write “a completed phys-
ics” and not simply “a completed science” here is that he has elsewhere said
explicitly that the notion of an “absolute conception” does not “look too pale”
because we have a conception of “what an adequate physics might look like.”5
One central difficulty with such a blatant materialism is the problem of
accounting for semantical properties. Williams says that such properties are
“perspectival,” but what exactly is that supposed to mean? Well, one thing it
means is that they aren’t “absolute” properties of the world; Williams says
explicitly that “the world itself has only primary qualities.”6 Given what
Williams says about the absolute conception (e.g., that it contains only pri-
mary qualities—and, presumably, what is definable in terms of primary
qualities using the apparatus of mathematical physics) and what he says
about semantic relations, it follows from Williams’s premises that an account
of them cannot figure in the absolute conception. And given his characteri-
zation of the absolute conception, it is not hard to see that he is right. What
would an account of a semantical relation in the language of mathematical
physics (or in terms of “primary qualities”) be?
Thus, Williams, on my reading of him, found himself in the position of
needing either to reduce semantical facts to purely physical facts or to be-
come an outright denier of the reality of the semantical (an “eliminativist,”
in the jargon of contemporary analytic philosophy).7 Indeed Williams ends
5. Williams, Descartes, 247.

6. Ibid., 247.
7. In current parlance, an “eliminativist” (Paul Churchland is the paradigm case)
holds that propositional attitudes (e.g., belief ) and semantic relations (e.g., reference)
don’t exist and that the idea that they do is a superstition (Churchland has compared
it to belief in witches, or in phlogiston). See Paul M. and Patricia S. Churchland,
“Activation Vectors vs. Propositional Attitudes: How the Brain Represents Reality,” in
On the Contrary: Critical Essays, 1987–1997 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
(Quine says, astonishingly, for example, that there is no fact of the matter as to whether
the name ‘Tabitha’ refers to his cat Tabitha or to the whole cosmos minus the cat! In
my view, Quine’s claim that reference is indeterminate to the extent that there is no
fact of the matter as to which object ‘Tabitha’ refers to is just eliminationism under
another name. See W. V. O. Quine, The Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1990), 33–34.) I criticize the cited essay of Churchland in my
Renewing Philosophy. Note that eliminativism is very different from reductionism.

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up by suggesting that eliminativism with respect to the semantical is proba-

bly the right line to take.8 For he wrote:
If the various sorts of considerations [Quinian and Davidsonian consider-

ations] which have been summarily sketched here are correct, then we have to
give up not just dualism but the belief in the determinacy of the mental. These
considerations converge on the conclusion that there are no fully determinate con-
tents of the world which are its psychological contents.9
Indeterminacy of “psychological contents” (in the sense of Quine and

Davidson) is precisely indeterminacy of the semantical. And that indetermi-
nacy, if their arguments are accepted, is far reaching indeed.
It is true that Donald Davidson, while giving full credit to Quine for the
arguments that allegedly establish “indeterminacy,” claimed that the extent
of indeterminacy is much reduced in his theory by his willingness to make
“a more far reaching application of the principle of charity” than Quine.10
(Perhaps this is the reason that Williams wrote “no fully determinate con-
tents” and not simply “no determinate contents.”) But charity is a maxim of
translation into the interpreter’s home language and it cannot bestow any
additional determinacy on the home language itself. It isn’t as if one could
really argue that reference is partially, even if not “fully,” determinate, except
in the sense (which even Rorty could agree with) of “determinate relative to
a translation scheme.” Dewey’s remark that thought “is treated as an illusion
or at most an accidental by-product” by materialists was right on the mark!
For semantical properties are precisely the properties that we need to de-
scribe thoughts as thoughts.
Indeed, the view that only the primary qualities of a completed future
physics are genuine properties of the world (“the world itself has only pri-
mary qualities”) would banish much more than the semantical properties to
8. I say “end up” because earlier in that work he favors the project of accounting for
all the “perspectives” and the properties they project onto the world in absolute terms.
By the closing pages of the book (Williams, Descartes, 300–302), however, this enter-
prise has been ruefully renounced as too ambitious.
9. Ibid., 300 (emphasis added).
10. Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1984), 228.

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the hazy realm of “indeterminacy.” (In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
Williams says that ‘grass’ and ‘green’ are terms that would not occur in fin-
ished science!)11 As a consequence, this view would seem to banish such
“special sciences” as economics.
A similar criticism was made by the economist-philosopher Vivian Walsh,
who wrote:
Economists cannot afford to neglect the failure of an advertising campaign

that tried to sell a shade of green which consumers rejected, or the devastating
results of a record drought upon grasslands. The things consumers [and cli-
ents!] want, or buy, or have produced for them, are chosen or rejected in terms
of features that arguably would not appear in “completed science” if it should
ever arrive. They live, move, and have their being, just like those who make
moral statements, on the “wrong” side of the dichotomy between “finished
science” and everything else that anyone ever says.12
2. Supervenience
American materialists are usually more coy about the real content of their
view than Bernard Williams was. Rather than say that the only terms that
would appear in a complete and nonperspectival account of reality are terms
for primary properties, they usually say that what Williams called the “per-
spectival” terms (including terms for psychological states) are “supervenient”
on the primary qualities.13 But what is “supervenience”?
The question is a difficult one, and the difficulty reminds me of an
episode in the history of late logical positivist philosophy of science. As
late as 1936, Rudolf Carnap still sought a way to “reduce” all the terms of
physics to “observation terms” such as ‘blue’ and ‘touches’ (for Carnap, as
later for Bernard Williams, physics was the paradigm of serious scientific
knowledge). But in 1939 Carnap gave up this project and settled for tak-
ing the “theoretical terms” of physics as primitives, while claiming that
11. Williams, Ethics, 139.

12. Vivian Walsh, “Smith after Sen,” Review of Political Economy 12, no. 1 (2000): 9.
13. See my discussion of Jaegwon Kim’s highly influential views in The Threefold
Cord: Mind, Body, and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

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there was still a profound difference between these terms, which, he said,
were only “incompletely” interpreted and the “completely” interpreted
observation terms.14 In a lecture titled “What Theories Are Not” that I
gave to an international congress in philosophy of science in 1960, I
explained:
The notion of partial interpretation has a rather strange history—the term

certainly has a technical ring to it, and someone encountering it in Carnap’s
writings, or Hempel’s, or mine certainly would be justified in supposing that
it was a term from mathematical logic whose exact definition was supposed to
be too well known to need repetition. The sad fact is that this is not so! The
term was introduced by Carnap in a section of his monograph (1939, 61–),
without definition (Carnap asserted that to interpret the observation terms of
a calculus is automatically to “partially interpret” the theoretical primitives,
without explanation), and has subsequently been used by Carnap and other
authors (including myself ) with copious cross-references, but with no further
explanation.15
I believe that the situation is very similar with respect to the term ‘superve-
nience’, except that in the case of this term many definitions have been
proposed. The problem, however, is that the term is used as if the definitions
in question entailed that the relation they define had certain properties, and
this is simply not the case!
Of the many definitions which have been proposed, the following pair
are by far the most common:
(S global) Phenomena describable by means of predicates in a certain set B

are globally supervenient upon the phenomena describable by means of
predicates in a certain set A if and only if there do not exist two physically possi-
14. Rudolph Carnap, “The Foundations of Logic and Mathematics,” International

Encyclopedia of Unified Science 1, no. 3 (1939). See especially §24, “Elementary and
Abstract Terms,” 61–67.
15. “What Theories Are Not” [1962], in Mathematics, Matter and Method:
Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 1:244–245. I
used the term myself without defining it, I am sorry to confess, in an early paper:
“Mathematics and the Existence of Abstract Entities,” Philosophical Studies 7, no. 6
(December 1956): 81–88.

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ble worlds, W1 and W2, such that the objects are the same in both worlds, and
their A-predicates are the same in both worlds, but their B-predicates are not
the same. In short, global supervenience means that global sameness of the distri-
bution of A-predicates necessitates global sameness of the distribution of
B-predicates.
(S local) Phenomena describable by means of predicates in a certain set B are

locally supervenient upon the phenomena describable by means of predi-
cates in a certain set A if and only if there do not exist two physically possible
objects O1 and O2, such that the A-predicates of those objects are the same but
their B-predicates are not the same. In short, global supervenience means that
local sameness of the distribution of A-predicates necessitates local sameness of the
distribution of B-predicates.
Although every philosopher who employs the term ‘supervenience’ would

agree that there is a difference between saying that a type B phenomenon is
supervenient upon another type A (usually described in the language of
physics) and saying that B-phenomena are nothing but C-phenomena, or
that B-phenomena are identical with certain C-phenomena, or that the lan-
guage we ordinarily use to speak of B-phenomena can be replaced by (or
“eliminated” in favor of ) the language scientists use to speak of A-phenomena,
in practice analytic metaphysicians take supervenience to have virtually the
same metaphysical significance as identity or elimination or reducibility. In
other words, once materialists have said that B-phenomena are “superve-
nient upon” A-phenomena, they often feel that they have, in effect, disposed
of the question of the metaphysical status of B-phenomena, especially if they
have argued to their own satisfaction that the supervenience of B-phenomena
upon A-phenomena is “local” rather than global.
As indicated above, the problem is that the term (or rather the pair of
terms “globally supervenient” and “locally supervenient”) are used by these
analytic metaphysicians as if the definitions in question entailed that the
relations they define had certain properties, but the relations defined by (S
global) and (S local) are easily shown not to have those properties.
The most important property ascribed to supervenience is this: if
B-phenomena supervene on A-phenomena, then it is supposed to be the
case that B-phenomena are determined by A-phenomena where “deter-

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mined” is obviously supposed to mean “explained.” Some years ago, the

Dutch chemist-philosopher Jaap van Brakel protested against the unclarity
of this notion of “determination” in a pair of important papers.16 In fact, it
is not hard to see that the accepted definitions of supervenience, (S global)
and (S local), do not even guarantee asymmetry!
To see why they do not, consider the following completely imaginable
possibility: suppose that it turns out to follow from general relativity (or
from quantum mechanics, or from a successor theory to both) that the
global electromagnetic field couldn’t be different without there being some
difference in the gravitational field, and suppose at the same time that the
gravitational field couldn’t be different without there being some difference
in the electromagnetic field. Does it follow without further argument either
that the gravitational field “determines” (or is the reality at the “basis” of ) the
electromagnetic field or that the electromagnetic field “determines” (or is the
reality at the “basis” of ) the gravitational field? I see no reason why either
should follow. Indeed, the possibility that we would immediately suspect is
that both fields are physically determined by something more fundamental,
some more basic field or some feature of the laws of quantum general rela-
tivity (a theory we have not yet succeeded in constructing).
What this thought experiment reveals is that supervenience as conven-
tionally defined simply means that there is a certain sort of functional rela-
tion between A-phenomena and B-phenomena. Since it is perfectly imagin-
able that there are functional relations in both directions (in the case of the
example I just used, from gravitational properties to electromagnetic prop-
erties and vice versa), it is not surprising that “supervenience” does not al-
ways run in one direction. And more important, that a functional relation
amounts to determination—and to “determination” in which sense—is some-
thing that has to be made out in each case, not something that the mere fact
(or assumption) of “supervenience” does for us.
Consider, now, the case of psychological phenomena. To say that psycho-
logical phenomena supervene globally on the “primary qualities” of physics
is just to say that there could not be two physically possible worlds which
are identical in their physical descriptions—in classical physics, that would
16. See Jaap van Brakel, “Interdiscourse or Supervenience Relations: The Primacy
of the Manifest Image,” Synthese 106, no. 2 (February., 1996): 253–297 and
“Supervienience and Anomalous Monism,” Dialectica 53 no. 1 (1999): 3–24.

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be to say that the distribution of “primary qualities” over fundamental phys-

ical objects is the same (or, in these days of quantum mechanics, that the
two physical universes have identical “state vectors” in Hilbert space)—but
in which different psychological phenomena take place. That psychological
phenomena are indeed globally supervenient in this way on fundamental
physical properties (or “states”) few would today doubt. But that the psy-
chological states of individual organisms are locally supervenient on the
fundamental physical properties of those organisms is false, if we accept
“externalism with respect to the mental,” as I have argued we must in
Representation and Reality and elsewhere. By “externalism with respect to
the mental,” I mean the thesis that the content of psychological states is
individuated by a history of interactions with one’s conspecifics and with
the entire natural environment, and not just by what goes on inside one’s
skull.17 (William James, by the way, was a fellow “externalist,” at least about
perceptual states, as his Essays in Radical Empiricism makes clear.)18
Today, the most common response of the materialist philosophers I am
speaking of is to grant the truth of externalism with respect to such inten-
tional states as thinking and believing but to try to argue that our psycholog-
ical states have a, so to speak, local core. In The Threefold Cord I argued that
this claim is confused and that, in fact, there are no isolated neural states that
have the properties that the “narrow contents” of our content-bearing psy-
chological states are supposed to have. To suppose, for example, that there is
any one neural state that every human being who thinks the thought that
there are many restaurants in Tokyo (that is, whose thought a good inter-
preter would interpret as the thought that there are many restaurants in
Tokyo) must be in one and the same neural state, or one and the same “com-
17. For example, according to externalists like myself, if we imagine that on Twin
Earth the liquid our counterparts refer to as ‘water’ is actually ‘twater’ (chemical for-
mula: XYZ) and not water (H2O), then when the words ‘I am drinking a glass of wa-
ter’ pass through the head of Twin Hilary what he is thinking is that he is drinking a
glass of twater, while what I think in the same circumstance is that I am drinking a
glass of water. Our thoughts are different even though the states of the quantized fields
that our bodies consist of are identical; and this shows that thinking a thought with a
given content is not ‘locally supervenient’ on the state of one’s body.
18. James, Works, vol. 3. See my Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1990).

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putational state,” independently of why she thinks that thought or what her
knowledge state, interests, purposes, etc., are, is science fiction, not science.
As I wrote there, “The futile search for scientific objects called ‘narrow con-
tents’ in the case of meanings and for ‘internal psychological states’ in the
case of beliefs are alike instances of the rationalist error of assuming that
whenever it is natural to project the same words into two different circum-
stances there must be an ‘entity’ that is present in both circumstances.”19
As for “global supervenience,” I and others have pointed out for many
years that global supervenience of psychological phenomena of the global
environment does not imply that psychological explanations are redundant.
If someone lets the water run in the bathtub to take a bath, for example, the
type phenomenon “deciding to turn on the water in a bathtub in order to
take a bath” is not definable in physical terms.20 And explanations, as
Davidson rightly saw, connect events under types. A physical explanation of
the trajectory of certain particles does not generalize to the same class of
cases as the psychological explanation, that the subject decided to turn on
the water in order to take a bath. Global supervenience does not mean that
individual psychological states are correlated with individual physical states
or, indeed, with a definable set of physical states. Psychological explanations
are still necessary, are still valid, and have ranges of applications which are
not the same as those of any physical explanations.
3. Pragmatist “Aristotelianism”
Some years ago, Martha Nussbaum and I argued that, according to Aristotle,
“the psychological activities of living beings, such as perceiving, desiring and
imagining, are realized or constituted in matter, are in fact the activities of
some suitable matter, and that the relation between form and matter is in
19. Putnam, The Threefold Cord, 125.

20. The question, famously raised by Donald Davidson, of the identity of the “to-
ken event” of, say, deciding to take a bath with a “token” physical event is beyond the
scope of this essay. My position (which I set out in The Threefold Cord, 37) is that
“events” are much too vague for the notion of “token identity” to make any real sense.

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fact one of constitution or realization not of identity or mere correlation.”21

And we concluded by saying that “we can have nonreductionism and the
explanatory priority of the intentional without losing sight of the natural
and organic unity of the intentional with its constitutive matter that is one
of the great contributions of Aristotelian realism.”22 Obviously, the positions
we ascribed to Aristotle there are positions that John Dewey also argued for,
and Human Nature and Conduct has sometimes been characterized as a sort
of “naturalized” (in Dewey’s sense, not the contemporary materialist sense!)
Aristotelianism.23 The criticisms of the materialist school of “analytic meta-
physics” I have been making might be restated in Aristotelian language thus:
the materialists speak as if the only explanatory principles were the fields and
particles of fundamental physics; what they entirely fail to see is that the
world has many, many different levels of form and that types of form are also
explanatory principles. If you want to explain, for example, why Kant wrote
a certain passage in The Critique of Pure Reason, a knowledge of quantum
mechanics and relativity theory won’t help you; as I put it in a paper I wrote
many years ago, most of the structure at the level of physics is irrelevant from the
point of view of [a] higher-level discipline.24
But pragmatism also has serious differences with the Aristotelian tradi-
tion, differences that, as has often been pointed out, are connected with the
fact the pragmatists came after and were deeply influenced by the discoveries
of Charles Darwin. For Aristotle, a given individual belongs to one and only
one (lowest) species (which lowest species a given individual belonged to is
supposedly determined by the essence of that individual), and the essence of
a given individual or species is supposed to be perfectly clear-cut (and, of
course, unique). But for Darwin and those biologists who built on his work,
what is important is variation. Species do not have sharp boundaries; in-
deed, the criteria for specieshood are actually criteria for species difference
(e.g., “populations” which are not cross-fertile belong to different species;
populations which are geographically isolated and have sufficiently different
phenotypes are normally classed as belonging to different species); and these
21. Martha Nussbaum and Hilary Putnam, “Changing Aristotle’s Mind,” in Words
and Life, 28.
22. Ibid., 55.
23. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, in Middle Works, vol. 14.
24. Putnam, Words and Life, 432.

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criteria, as Ernst Mayr, the grand old man of today’s evolutionary biology,
always emphasized, do not yield a “clean” division of organisms into disjoint
species.25 Nor is this a defect in population biology: the basic teaching of
Darwinism is that the line between species can’t be sharp—otherwise one
species could not evolve from another! Variation is fundamental, and “essen-
tialist” thinking is taboo.
Indeed, we may say that from an evolutionary biologist’s point of view,
species are historic entities, very much like nations. Being a dog is being a
member of a species somewhat as being a Frenchman is being a citizen of a
nation; someone with much the same characteristics as a Frenchman might
be a citizen of Belgium, or of the United States, and something with many
of the same characteristics as a dog might not be a dog, because the “popu-
lation” to which it belongs has sufficient distinctness and enough genetic
and geographical isolation to count as a new species.
From a molecular biologist’s point of view, the situation is quite different.
It is true that even at the molecular level there is variation. It is not possible
to give necessary and sufficient conditions for being a dog in terms of DNA,
on account of the mechanisms of genetic variation that Mayr and other
evolutionary biologists emphasize (indeed, there may be as much similarity
between the DNA of a wolf and that of a dog as there is between a Chihuahua
and a Great Dane), but there are true statements of the form “If something
did not have DNA with such-and-such properties, it would not be a dog.”26
The anti-essentialism of which I speak is beautifully expressed in a letter
that James wrote late in his life, in 1906, to a philosophical critic, Dickinson
S. Miller:
25. Ernst Mayr, Evolution and the Diversity of Life: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1976).
26. These two different points of view even lead to different decisions about what
is a dog; it would not be surprising to learn that molecular biologists classed Australian
dingos as a kind of dog and population biologists did not, for example. And there are
still other interests that can lead to still other, perfectly legitimate, decisions on what is
and is not a ‘dog’. For an ordinary “dog lover,” wild dogs are not ‘dogs’, while for a
scientist they are. Australian dingos are paradigmatic dogs for the Aboriginal inhabi-
tants, whatever population biologists (or ordinary Europeans or Americans) may say.
All of these classifications are legitimate, and useful in the contexts for which they are
designed. To ask what the ‘real’ essence of my last dog, Shlomit, was would be to ask a
meaningless question.

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I got your letter about “Pragmatism,” etc., some time ago. . . . I sent you a
week ago a “Journal of Philosophy” with a word more about Truth in it, writ-
ten at you mainly; but I hardly dare hope that I have cleared up my position.
A letter from Strong, two days ago, written after receiving a proof of that pa-
per, still thinks that I deny the existence of realities outside the thinker; and
Perry . . . accused Pragmatists (though he doesn’t name me) of ignoring or
denying that the real objects play any part in deciding what ideas are true. I
confess that such misunderstandings seem to me hardly credible. . . .
Apparently it all comes from the word Pragmatism—and a most unlucky
word it may prove to have been. I am a natural realist. The world per se may
be likened to a cast of beans on a table. By themselves they spell nothing. An
onlooker may group them as he likes. He may simply count them all and map
them. He may select groups and name these capriciously, or name them to
suit certain extrinsic purposes of his. Whatever he does, so long as he takes
account of them, his account is neither false nor irrelevant. If neither, why not
call it true? It fits the beans-minus-him, and expresses the total fact, of beans-
plus-him. Truth in this total sense is partially ambiguous, then. If he simply
counts or maps, he obeys a subjective interest as much as if he traces figures.
Let that stand for pure “intellectual” treatment of the beans, while grouping
them variously stands for non-intellectual interests. All that . . . I contend for
is that there is no “truth” without some interest, and that non-intellectual in-
terests play a part as well as the intellectual ones. Whereupon we are accused
of denying the beans, or denying being in any way constrained by them.27
But in one respect, James’s image of the “cast of beans” is misleading. It sug-
gests (although I am sure that this isn’t what James himself thought) that
there is a fixed set of fundamental objects, the ‘beans’, and that human cre-
ativity is restricted to choosing different collections of fundamental objects
to name. But, for various purposes, we are constantly enlarging our notion
of an object. Talk of “quantized fields” in physics, of “neuroses” in psychia-
try, of “populations” in biology, of “recessions” in economics, etc., illustrates
the way in which our conceptual vocabularies, our very conceptions of what
there is to refer to, are constantly being enlarged. And in many cases, there
are equally good but not identical ways of enlarging those conceptual vocab-
ularies. The idea of one fixed conceptual vocabulary in which one can once
27. William James, The Letters of William James, 2 vols., ed. Henry James Jr.
(Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 295–296.

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and for all describe the structure of reality (as if it had only one fixed struc-
ture), whether in its traditional (e.g., Aristotelian) form or its recent materi-
alist form is untenable.28
4. Philosophy without Essences
From Aristotle to the great seventeenth-century revolutions in philosophy,

philosophy almost always posited a realm of “intelligible” entities, entities
uniquely available to “Reason” (that is, to the reason of philosophers), with
fixed and immutable essences. That realm was the subject matter of meta-
physics. Those entities were, in one way or another, held to provide the rea-
sons for being (the raison d’etre in a very literal sense) of all the “sublunar,”
or mundane, and contingent entities that we encounter.29
Of course, the anti-Aristotelian aspect of pragmatism was not confined to
the rejection of the idea of fixed and immutable essences. Starting with
Peirce’s attack on “the method of what is agreeable to reason” in The Fixation
of Belief, pragmatists attacked the idea that a priori knowledge of the con-
tents and organizing principles of reality was possible. Although empiricism,
too, was officially committed to the same rejection of apriorism, in practice,
I would argue, pragmatism—and especially Deweyan pragmatism—was far
more aware of the consequences of a consistent anti-apriorism. Dewey, for
example, finds traditional empiricism in its own way as aprioristic as tradi-
tional rationalism.
In introductory courses in philosophy, the seventeenth-century revolu-
28. It is untenable not only because reality is more pluralistic than metaphysicians
are wont to admit—and “pluralism” is something James loved—but because reality is
also vaguer. Metaphysicians are wont to pretend that at some “ultimate” level, there is
no vagueness at all. But no real content attaches to this suggestion. Even to say, as some
do, that “the world itself is not vague; it is just that what we are referring to by our
words is sometimes vague” is self-refuting—for if reference is vague, then something in
the world is vague!—Or is reference supposed to be something outside the world?!
29. Abe Stone has remarked that the twentieth-century metaphysics of Husserl’s
Ideas actually retains this traditional structure; the novelty in Husserl lies in a new ac-
count of the relation of “psychology,” as the empirical science of sublunar minds, to
philosophy (“phenomenology”) as the account of the intelligible beings and their es-
sence.

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tions I spoke of are often presented as if they completely overthrew this struc-
ture (or as if empiricism, at least, did so), but it is not hard to see that this is
an exaggeration. As Dewey explains in The Quest for Certainty, classical em-
piricism took it for granted that the mind is confronted with “ideas” or “sen-
sations” or Empfindungen, that these are mental objects, and that the general
form of these objects and of their “qualities” was a pretty self-evident matter.30
Although, by the time he wrote The Analysis of Mind, Russell came to see that
the possibility of dividing up every experience into a part that is simply given
and a part that is contributed by conceptualization (a “mnemic” element, in
his jargon) was contestable, he felt that he had to defend it, on virtually a
priori grounds. By way of contrast, in Dewey’s view, if rationalism made the
mistake of supposing that the most fundamental laws of nature, and hence
the form of scientific explanations at least in physics, could be known a priori,
still the empiricist belief that the most fundamental experiential objects and
their properties (and hence the nature of all empirical “data”) could be known
once and for all was a perfectly comparable mistake. Against this aspect of the
empiricist tradition, Dewey, continuing a line of thought that James had be-
gun, insisted that by creating new observation-concepts we “institute” new
data.31 Modern physics (and of course not only physics) has richly born him
out. A scientist may observe a proton colliding with a nucleus, observe a virus
with the aid of an electron microscope, or observe genes or black holes, etc.
Neither the form of possible explanations nor the form of possible data can be fixed
in advance, once and for all.32
30. Dewey, Later Works, vol. 4: The Quest for Certainty.

31. “The new data thus instituted do much more than provide facts for confirming
and refining old conceptions. They institute a new order of problems whose solution
requires a new frame of conceptual reference. In particular, it was by the use of new in-
struments and techniques that changes and relations of change were disclosed in what
had previously been taken as fixed; a process that has gone on at an accelerated rate since
the 17th century. This change in the nature of data was both the source and the product
of the universal adoption of the experimental method and the new order of conceptions
demanded by its successful execution.” Dewey, Logic, in Later Works, 12:388–389.
32. As we have seen contemporary materialism (self-styled “naturalism”) largely
ignores this Deweyan and Jamesian insight. For it, ideal knowledge is just future phys-
ics, and there is one fixed vocabulary—a vocabulary of which we already possess a sort
of sketch in present-day physics—in which it will be couched.

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Like traditional metaphysics, contemporary materialism postulates a dis-

tinct realm of things which are the ultimate explanatory principles of all
beings, although it is fallibilist to the extent of allowing physicists rather
than philosophers to determine the contents of that realm. Following Quine,
it often says that what we call “change” is a sort of illusion and that the ideal
description of this reality would be in what it calls a “tenseless” language. It
does not think that realm can be known a priori, to be sure, but it does freely
speculate about the form of an “absolute conception” of that realm, a fin-
ished science. And it often takes that speculation to be the only remaining
function of philosophy. It is not hard to see that materialist metaphysics is a
decidedly conservative affair. In rejecting the entire picture of a philosophi-
cal subject of metaphysics with a subject matter which consists of funda-
mental objects which are the explanatory principles of all “beings,” pragma-
tism is quite different.
I have, I think, shown that it is different—but not yet that it is unique.
For another tradition—one slightly but not a great deal older than pragma-
tism, the continental tradition of existentialism (including, under that ru-
bric, Heidegger’s phenomenology, but not Husserl’s) likewise attacked this
conception of philosophy’s task. I shall close this essay by contrasting prag-
matism and existentialism.
5. Pragmatism and Existentialism
Existentialists, from Nietzsche on, used scornful language to describe the

traditional metaphysical enterprise that I have so sweepingly (but, I think,
not inaccurately) described. Heidegger famously described that enterprise as
“ontotheology.” Their alternative to what they saw as a fatally flawed concep-
tion of the task of philosophy was typically to diagnose what they saw as the
falsity at the root of (most of ) our lives and to recommend an alternative to
that falsity. For Nietzche, fear of life is at the heart of our sickness, and the
will to live (which Heidegger unsympathetically described as “the will to
will”) is what has to be revived and strengthened. For Kierkegaard, address-
ing people who thought they were Christians, the problem was just that—
that they thought they were Christians, that they knew what it means to be
a “Christian,” and what they had to learn—not intellectually, because intel-

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lectualization is a principal symptom of their illness, but existentially—is

what it really means to have a Christian relation to God.
For Heidegger (even if he attempts to deny that “authenticity” is a nor-
mative concept), the sickness is inauthenticity, and the valorized life com-
bines authentic acceptance of absurdity (the “Nothing”) with submissive-
ness toward Being in ways that Heidegger interpreters endlessly argue about.
What I want to emphasize is that along with the abandonment of metaphys-
ics, this search for God, in Kierkegaard’s case, or for a secular substitute for
an existential connection to God, in the case of the atheist existentialists, led
to either an abandonment of or an irresponsible relation to the political, as
well as to a disinterest or a failure to see the philosophical significance of sci-
ence and, in Heidegger’s case, not just to disastrous politics, but to a disas-
trous philosophy of history.33 In contrast, Dewey famously declared,
“Philosophy will recover itself when it ceases to deal with the problems of
philosophers and addresses the problems of men.”34
It is important to note that Dewey wrote “problems” in the plural.
Pragmatists refuse to believe that there is just one problem of men, that is, of
persons, and just one solution. Dewey also wrote that philosophy “has no
Mosaic or Pauline authority of revelation entrusted to it.” The pragmatist
philosopher does not pretend to be a prophet or an oracle. But pragmatist
philosophy does aspire to “the authority of intelligence, of criticism of . . .
common and natural goods.”35 The pragmatist is willing to address existen-
tial concerns; but he does not think that one can responsibly address them,
address them without falsifying them, without addressing quotidian con-
cerns. “If philosophy no longer has either a unique subject matter, nor a
unique prophetic vision, then how can it continue at all?” I sometimes heard
students ask. Dewey’s answer was that philosophy has no need to be unique
(an answer which is, however, itself unique!).
James already argued in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” that
“the ethical philosopher must wait on facts,” and furthermore,
33. For a penetrating description and criticism of Heidegger’s philosophy of his-

tory, see Nicholas Boyle, Who Are We Now? Christian Humanism and the Global Market
from Hegel to Heaney (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998).

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he only knows if he makes a bad mistake, the cries of the wounded will soon
inform him of the fact. In all this the philosopher is just like the rest of us
non-philosophers, so far as we are just and sympathetic instinctively, and so
far as we are open to the voice of complaint. His function is in fact indistin-
guishable from that of the best kind of statesman at the present day. His books
on ethics, therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more and
more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative and sug-
gestive rather than dogmatic—I mean with novels and dramas of the deeper
sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and philanthropy and social and
economical reform. Treated in this way ethical treatises may be voluminous
and luminous as well; but they can never be final, except in their abstractest
and vaguest features, and they must more and more abandon old-fashioned,
clearcut, and would-be “scientific” form.36
Here James exaggerates when he writes “indistinguishable.” Philosophy is

distinguishable from statesmanship, spiritual exhortation, and literature.
But the difference, Dewey would say, is one of degree: philosophy at its best
is simply more reflective, more critical, more wide-ranging. ‘Criticism’ is a
word Dewey loved, and, in fact, he once defined philosophy as “criticisms of
criticisms.”37 Although Stanley Cavell has been at times critical (unfairly
critical, I believe) of Dewey, I believe that Cavell’s characterization of philos-
ophy as “education for grownups” is one that Dewey would have approved.38
A philosophy that renounces both the dreams of metaphysics and the
self-importance of existentialism is a grownup philosophy; and only a
grownup philosophy is fit to educate grownups.
One last but essential remark. To call upon ourselves, as I just have, to
renounce both the dreams of metaphysics and the self-importance of exis-
tentialism is NOT to join the logical positivists of yesteryear in calling both
metaphysics and existentialism “nonsense.” There is MUCH of permanent
36. James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” in The Will to Believe, in
Works, 6:141–162, 158–159.
38. For criticism of Dewey see Stanley Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson
a Pragmatist?” In The Revival of Pragmatism; New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and
Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998) 72–82.
For the reference to philosophy as a kind of education see Stanley Cavell, The Claim of
Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 125.

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value in the writing of both traditional metaphysicians and the great existen-
tialists. It would be false to Dewey’s own spirit to deny that there is. But my
self-imposed task today has been to bring out the uniqueness of pragmatism,
and to do that I have had to emphasize what pragmatists see as the failures
of those traditions.

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4
Pragmatism and Nonscientific

Knowledge
Hilary Putnam
IN THE PRESENT essay I wish to address a question which has been a focus
for my philosophical interests for the past twenty years: the existence of and
the importance of knowledge outside of the exact sciences (“nonscientific”
knowledge) and in particular the existence and importance of knowledge of
values in the widest sense—what is it to know that something is better or
worse than something else: a better way of life, or a better course of action,
or a better theory (in science), or a better interpretation (of a text, etc.). This
focus has naturally led me to point out how “paradigmatic” science (physics)
itself depends on judgments which are “nonscientific.” It has also led me into
the controversial question of how it is possible for value claims to be objec-
tive, and it has led me to a close reading of the American pragmatists, who
were my predecessors in the study of all of these problems.
What I would like to do is to give an account of the general conclusions
to which I have come, and to do so in as nontechnical a way as possible. This
is not something that philosophers do very often nowadays; usually we read
a paper to one another on some fairly well-defined topic. But if philosophy
is to retain its connection to the wide human concerns which have always
been its reason for existence, from time to time a philosopher must speak
not as a channel for a particular argument or thesis but as an individual who
embodies a point of view—a point of view whose formulation is necessarily

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idiosyncratic but which, the philosopher hopes, embodies insights that are
something more than idiosyncratic at the end. For this reason, I shall allow
myself not only to sketch a point of view rather than argue for it in detail but
I shall also allow myself to explain why I hold it by describing the particular
way in which it developed in the course of my writing and teaching.
Science Presupposes Nonscientific Knowledge
It was Rudolf Carnap’s dream for the last three decades of his life to show
that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my
knowledge holds out any hope for that project.1 Karl Popper rejected
Carnap’s inductive logic, but he too hoped to reduce the scientific method
to a simple rule: test all strongly falsifiable theories, and retain the ones that
survive. But that works no better than does Carnap’s “inductive logic”; for
when a theory conflicts with what has previously been supposed to be fact,
we sometimes give up the theory and we sometimes give up the supposed
fact and, as Quine famously put it, the decision is a matter of trade-offs that
are “where rational, pragmatic” (i.e., a matter of informal judgments of plau-
sibility, simplicity, and the like).2 Nor is it the case that when two theories
conflict, scientists wait until the observational data decide between them, as
Popperian philosophy of science demands they should.
An example I have often used in this connection is the following: both
Einstein’s theory of gravitation and Alfred North Whitehead’s 1922 theory
1. In fact, in his response to my “‘Degree of Confirmation’ and Inductive Logic,”

Carnap backs away significantly from the hopes for an algorithm that would enable us
to reproduce the judgments of an ideal inductive judge he expressed in Logical
Foundations of Probability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), his only book-
length treatment of inductive logic. For a proof that Carnap’s project could not do
that, see my just-cited paper in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. Paul A. Schilpp
(La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1963), 761–783 [reprinted in Hilary Putnam, Mathematics,
Matter and Method (1975), 270–292].
2. Although the view is much older, it was influentially put forward by Quine in
his celebrated “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” collected in W. V. O. Quine, From a
Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953).

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PR AGM AT ISM A ND NONSCI E NT IFIC K NOW L E DGE 57
(of which very few people have ever heard!) agreed with special relativity,
and both predicted the familiar phenomena of the deflection of light by
gravitation, the non-Newtonian character of the orbit of Mercury, the
exact orbit of the moon, etc. Yet Einstein’s theory was accepted and
Whitehead’s theory was rejected fifty years before anyone thought of an ob-
servation that would decide between the two.3 Indeed, a great number of
theories must be rejected on nonobservational grounds, for the rule “Test
every theory that occurs to anyone” is impossible to follow. As Bronowski
once wrote to his friend Popper, “You would not claim that scientists test
every falsifiable theory if as many crazy theories crossed your desk as cross
mine!”4
In short, judgments of coherence, simplicity, etc., are presupposed by
physical science. Yet coherence and simplicity and the like are values. Indeed,
each and every one of the familiar arguments for relativism (or radical con-
textualism) in ethics could be repeated without the slightest alteration in
connection with these epistemic values; the argument that ethical values are
metaphysically “queer” (because, inter alia, we do not have a sense organ for
detecting “goodness”) could be modified to read “epistemic values are onto-
logically queer (because we do not have a sense organ for detecting simplic-
ity and coherence)”; the familiar arguments for relativism or noncognitivism
from the disagreements between cultures concerning values (arguments
which are often driven by the fashionable, but I believe wholly untenable,
pictures of different cultures as “incommensurable”) could be modified to
3. The refutation of Whitehead’s theory was the work of Clifford M. Will,

“Theoretical Frameworks for Testing Relativistic Gravity,” The Astrophysical Journal 163
(1971): 595.
4. It is also worth pointing out that Popper repeatedly claims that the famous
eclipse experiment was an experimentum crucis, and thus illustrates the superior “falsi-
fiability” of Einstein’s general relativity. In fact, the experiment produced four sets of
results; depending on which of the (poor quality) photographs one trusted, one got
Einsteinian deviation, Newtonian deviation, and even double Einsteinian deviation!
Really solid experimental confirmation of general relativity came only in the 1960s.
(For an account of this confirmation, see C. Misner, K. Thorne, and J. Wheeler, eds.,
Gravitation (New York: Freeman, 1973), Part IX. That general relativity was accepted
before there were decisive experiments in its favor of course contradicts completely the
whole Popperian account, which can be characterized as mythological.

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read that there are disagreements between cultures concerning what beliefs
are more “coherent,” “plausible,” “simpler as accounts of the facts,” etc.; and
in both the case of ethics and the case of science there are those who would
say that when cultures disagree, saying that one side is objectively right is
mere rhetoric.5
By the way, with respect to this idea of the “incommensurability” of cul-
tures, I cannot resist pointing out that when it comes to imperatives to ab-
stain from pride and cruelty and hatred and oppression, one can find the
same universalistic statements in ancient Egyptian literature that one hears
today. For example, as Simone Weil writes: “There has never been a more
moving definition of virtue than the words, spoken in The Book of the Dead
by the soul on the way to salvation”:
Lord of Truth . . . I have brought truth to thee, and I have destroyed wicked-
ness for thee . . . I have not thought scorn of God . . . I have not brought
forward my name for honors . . . I have not caused harm to be done to the
servant by his master . . . I have made no one weep . . . I have not struck fear
into any man . . . I have not spoken haughtily . . . I have not made myself deaf
to the words of right and truth.6
I have emphasized the fact that familiar arguments for relativism with respect
to values would, if they were correct, apply to our epistemic values as well
because it is only by appreciating this that one can see just how self-refuting
relativism actually is. Consider, for example, the well-known views of Richard
Rorty, a philosopher who holds that we should scrap the whole notion of an
objective world and speak of views which “our culture” would accept (some-
times he adds “at its best”) instead. This view that all there is to values—in-
cluding the epistemic values—is the consensus of “our” culture presupposes
that at least some of our commonsense claims can be accepted without phil-
osophical reinterpretation of the kind proposed. For instance, talk of “cul-
5. For a devastating critique of this idea, and of the way it has infected cultural
anthropology since the days of Herder, see Michelle Moody-Adams, Fieldwork in
Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997).
6. Simone Weil, Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 131–132.

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tures” only makes sense when talk of other people, talk of beliefs—in short, the
idea of a common world—is already in place. If Rorty were to say that talk of
other people is just “marks and noises” that help me “cope,” it would become
obvious that his talk of “the standards of our culture” is empty by his own
lights. Commonsense realism about the views of my cultural peers coupled with
antirealism about everything else makes no sense. If, as Rorty likes to claim, the
notion of an objective world makes no sense, then the notion of “our cul-
ture” cannot be more than Rorty’s private fantasy, and if there is no such
thing as objective justification—not even of claims about what other people
believe—then Rorty’s talk of “solidarity” with the views of “our culture” is
mere rhetoric.
Rorty, of course, would agree with my claim that scientific inquiry pre-
supposes that we take seriously claims which are not themselves scientific,
including value claims of all kinds; he would simply say that we should give
up the notion that there is such a thing as objectivity either in scientific or
nonscientific inquiry. But at least some philosophers who wish to hold on to
the idea of scientific objectivity without admitting that science presupposes
judgments which are not themselves scientific would take a different tack.
The only serious alternative, in fact, to admitting that the existence of
warrantedly assertible claims as to matters that are “nonscientific,” warrant-
edly assertible claims as to what is more plausible than what, warrantedly as-
sertible claims as to what is more coherent than what, warrantedly assertible
claims as to what is simpler than what—that are presupposed by the activity
of gathering knowledge even in the paradigm science of physics—is the so-
called reliabilist epistemology proposed by Alvin Goldman.7 According to
that epistemology, what makes a belief in science justified is that its accep-
tance was arrived at by a method which is ‘reliable’ in the sense of having a
high probability of resulting in the acceptance of true hypotheses. Effective objec-
tions have been made to this idea, and Goldman has made sophisticated al-
terations in his original formulations in order to meet them, but these are not
the grounds on which I would argue that this approach does not succeed. To
see why, let us simply consider a question: on what “method” was Einstein
relying when he accepted the special and general theories of relativity?
7. See Alvin I. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1986). I thank Jamie Tappenden for suggesting I discuss this alterna-
tive.

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Einstein’s own views are well known. He tells us that he arrived at the
special theory of relativity by applying an empiricist critique to the notion of
“simultaneity” and that he arrived at general relativity by seeking the “simplest”
theory of gravity compatible with special relativity in the infinitesimal domain.
We know that the physicists who accepted these two theories also regarded
these as compelling considerations in their favor. Both of these “methods”
are completely topic specific (so much so, that the reference class of theories
involved is much too small for it to make sense to speak of “probabilities”
here at all!), and both of these methods presuppose judgments of reasonable-
ness.8 And judgments of reasonableness simply do not fall into classes to
which we are able to assign probabilities.9 In sum, not only is there no reason
to think that the sorts of judgments I have been talking about—judgments
of reasonableness—can be reduced to nonnormative judgments; there is not
even a serious sketch of such a reduction.
Objectivity
The claim that judgments of fact presuppose judgments of value has been
around at least since Dewey. This makes one wonder at the enormous reluc-
tance of so many philosophers to acknowledge that value judgments can have
any objectivity at all. The real source of our difficulties, I believe, is the crudity
of the notions of “objectivity” that are so often brought to these discussions.
Let us begin by thinking about how we judge objectivity when we are not
trying to do “metaphysics.” Normally we call statements which are made
8. This objection to reliabilism was suggested to me by Ernest Nagel’s objection to

Reichenbach’s views on the justification of theories (views which were, themselves, of
a “reliabilist” character). See Ernest Nagel, “Principles of the Theory of Probability,”
Journal of Philosophy 36, no. 6 (1939):163–165.
9. It might be claimed that judgments of reasonableness are carried out according
to an unconscious algorithm built into our brains. This presupposes the success of a
computationalist account of scientific rationality. For a criticism of this presupposi-
tion, see my Representation and Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). It is also
not clear why such an account of how our brains work should yield a factorization of
the various arguments we accept into “methods” of the kind required by reliabilist
epistemology.

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from an idiosyncratic standpoint, or by persons who are heedless of other

relevant interests and standpoints, “subjective,” while statements are called
“objective” if their claim to truth is not dependent on idiosyncratic stand-
points or on disregarding the standpoints and interests of others.10
A sufficient condition that an ethical claim be objective in this “ordinary”
sense is that it be reasonable from the standpoint of an interest in the common
welfare, where the common welfare is not thought of as something already
handed down but as something that is itself to be determined by intelligent
discussion among persons who share this commitment. I wish to emphasize
that this is something that I suggest only as a sufficient condition, and by no
means a necessary one. “Value judgments” are not a homogeneous class, and
different sorts of judgments possess different sorts of objectivity.
If it is reasonable for those affected to accept an ethical claim of this sort
after experimentation and discussion, it will be—so long as reasons to ques-
tion it do not arise—what John Dewey called a “warrantedly assertible”
claim. And the similarity between asking what beliefs are acceptable from the
standpoint of persons who are (1) concerned to be able to justify their beliefs
to other persons, and (2) to do so by appeal to standards that other persons
who share that very concern cannot reasonably reject, and asking what ac-
tions are justifiable from the standpoint of persons who are concerned to be
able to justify their actions to other persons, and to do so by appeal to stan-
dards that other persons who share that very concern cannot reasonably re-
ject, is not accidental; these concerns, like the concern with cognitive values
and the concern with ethical values in general, presuppose one another.
This is, of course, not the way philosophers usually think of objectivity.
More often philosophers attempt to define ‘objective’ by phrases like “reality
has an existence and character wholly independent of human practices, be-
liefs and evidence” or “something’s being the case is independent of how
anyone would regard it.”11
But such definitions are philosophers’ blinkers rather than workable con-
ceptions. Indeed, as the historian of science Peter Gallison has pointed out
10. By “statements” what I mean here are things that are said on particular occasions,
not “sentences” in the abstract.
11. For the first of these notions of objectivity see Brian Leiter, “The Middle Way,”
21–31, 21; for the second see Jules L. Coleman, “Truth and Objectivity in Law,” 33–
68, 56. Both appear in Legal Theory 1 (March 1995).

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to me, this use of the word ‘objective’ is somewhat of a curiosity. In scientific

practice, questions of objectivity are not questions of metaphysics; they are
questions as to the character of particular claims made in particular inqui-
ries. In contrast to this epistemological sense of the term, ‘objective’ seems to
be used by metaphysical realists today somewhat as “cognitively meaningful”
used to be used by logical positivists: as a term for claims which “really,”
metaphysically or ontologically, “have a truth value.”12
In fact, metaphysical realist definitions of ‘objectivity’ are easily seen to be
failures in their own terms. Regarding “something’s being the case is inde-
pendent of how anyone would regard it,” it suffices to note that reality does
not have an existence and character wholly independent of human practices,
beliefs, and evidence for the simple reason that human practices, beliefs, and
evidence are a very large part of the reality we talk about, and reality would
be quite different were they different. Perhaps causal independence is not
what is meant? But then I do not know what is meant.
Metaphysical realists often insist that a truly objective statement is one
whose truth has no connection with warranted assertibility, actual or possible;
but this too is just a philosophical shibboleth, because there are many state-
ments for which truth is conceptually connected to warranted assertibility un-
der appropriate conditions.13 And these include many statements which
metaphysical realists would class as “objective.” That there are mountains in
the area bounded by 70°W to 75°W and by 40°N to 45°N is an objective
fact if anything is; but given that it is part of the concept of a mountain that
mountains are big enough to see, it necessarily follows that if there are
mountains in that area, and if appropriate conditions exist (people who
know their own latitude and longitude are there to see them, and there is
12. I myself succumbed to the temptation to turn objectivity into a metaphysical

notion, it now seems to me, with the “continuum” model of objectivity that I espoused
in The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987) and retained as recently
as “Are Moral and Legal Values Made or Discovered?” [1995] in The Collapse of the
Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002). I owe thanks to Jim Conant, who pointed out to me that speaking of ethical
values as having an “in between” sort of objectivity is already accepting a contrast with
some sort of “greater” objectivity which they lack.
13. See my “Pragmatism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95, no. 3 (March
1995): 291–306.

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nothing to interfere with their seeing the mountains, etc.) it will be warrant-
edly assertible that there are mountains in the area in question. (Perhaps
conceptual independence is not what is meant either?! It is no accident that
metaphysical realists never do tell us what they mean by “independent.”)
That in such a case (and in the case of most ordinary statements about ob-
servable things) truth—“realist truth,” if you please—and warranted assertibil-
ity under appropriate conditions coincide is no accident. To understand the
claim that there is a mountain in a certain place I must know what a mountain
is, and normally this means knowing what mountains look like.14 Grasp of the
content of a claim (and hence of its “truth conditions”) and grasp of its verifi-
cation conditions are conceptually related, even if they are not the same.
Moreover, such extreme requirements for “objectivity” as total indepen-
dence from what humans could do or could know or believe are irrelevent to
ethics from the start. No ethicist except a rampant Platonist would say that
what is right and wrong is independent of human nature, or, more particu-
larly, independent of how human beings who are raised in a community
with a moral tradition would regard things.15 Certainly Aristotle did not
hold that what it is right for human beings to do or to be is “independent of
how human beings would regard it” in any and all circumstances. Yet it is
decidedly odd to suppose that the sort of objectivity Aristotle sees ethical
statements as having is, for that reason, not “realist” or not “cognitivist.” For
these (and other reasons, too numerous to go into now) I find the attempt
to force us to classify our beliefs as “objective” or “subjective” (and the as-
sumptions that are tacitly made about which beliefs are which, and about
what follows if a belief is put in one box or the other), decidedly objection-
able.16 A pressing task for philosophy, as I see it, is to challenge these classifi-
cations, so that we may see the terrain without the distortions which they
inevitably produce.
14. I neglect the possibility of someone’s learning the word ‘mountain’ by having it
defined in terms of other notions which have observational import—ultimately our
concepts must connect to what we can observe if our thought is to have bearing on
reality at all.
15. As John McDowell remarks in Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1994), it is not clear that Plato himself was a rampant Platonist!
16. See my The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987), but note
the change of view mentioned in note 12.

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But How Are Objective Ethical Claims Possible?
By now I hope to have convinced you that the denial of the very possibility
of objective value claims threatens to turn into a denial of the very possibility
of (a reasonable sort of ) objectivity tout court. But I know that this will not
shake the confidence in the fact/value dichotomy of people who have come
to see that dichotomy as inseparable from modern scientific sophistication.17
Such people may agree that we should not think of objectivity in the way in
which metaphysical realists think of it, but they do not see how value judg-
ments in ethics can have any sort of objectivity at all. In their view, accep-
tance of a fact/value dichotomy is part of the epistemology that goes with
modern science. I have already alluded to the crudest of the epistemological
defenses of the fact/value dichotomy, which run like this: “How can there be
‘objective ethical values’? We can say how we detect yellow, since we have
eyes, but what sense organ do we have for detecting value?”
What makes this argument crude is its naiveté about perception.
Perceptions of yellow may, indeed, be pretty minimally conceptually in-
formed. But consider the parallel question: “How could we come to tell that
people are elated? After all, we have no sense organ for detecting elation.” We
can tell that other people are elated, and sometimes we can even see that
other people are elated. But we can only do so after we have acquired the
concept of elation. Perception is not innocent; it is an exercise of our con-
cepts, an exercise of what Kant called our “spontaneity.”18 Once I have ac-
quired the concept of elation, I can see that someone is elated, and similarly,
once I have acquired the concept of a friendly person, or a malicious person,
or a kind person, I can sometimes see that someone is friendly, or malicious,
or kind. To be sure such judgments are fallible, but pragmatists have never
believed in infallibility, either in perception or anywhere else. As Peirce once
put it, in science we do not have or need a firm foundation; we are on
swampy ground, but that is what keeps us moving.
Connected with the idea that to know that there are values we would
need to have a special sense organ is the empiricist psychology according to
17. The idea that it is was, of course, eloquently defended by Max Weber. See, for
example, his “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H.
Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 129–157.
18. See McDowell, Mind and World, 4.

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which perceptual experience (as opposed to “emotion”) is value neutral, and

values are added to experience by “projection.” (In a variant of this idea—
one equally wedded to separate mental “faculties”—“perception” supplies
“reason” with neutral facts, and values come from a faculty called “the will.”)
This empiricist psychology has been sharply criticized by a number of au-
thors.19 And the American pragmatists in particular have always emphasized
that experience isn’t “neutral,” that it comes to us screaming with values. In
infancy we experience food and drink and cuddling and warmth as good and
pain and deprivation and loneliness as bad; and as our experiences multiply
and become more sophisticated, the tinges and shades of value also multiply
and become more sophisticated. Think, for example, of a wine taster’s de-
scription of a great wine.
However, the pragmatists do not make the error of supposing that merely
being valued, as a matter of experiential fact, suffices to make something
valuable. Indeed, no distinction is more insistent in John Dewey’s writing
than the distinction between the valued and the valuable, between a satisfac-
tion and the satisfactory, between the desired and the desirable.20 Dewey’s
answer to the question “What makes something valuable as opposed to
merely being valued?” in a word is criticism. Objective value arises, not from
a special “sense organ,” but from the criticism of our valuings. Valuings are
incessant and inseparable from all of our activities, including our “scientific”
ones; but it is by intelligent reflection on our valuings, intelligent reflection
of the kind that Dewey calls “criticism,” that we conclude that some of them
are warranted while others are unwarranted. (Philosophy, by the way, is de-
scribed by Dewey as criticism of criticism!)
But this leads to the next question: “By what criteria do we decide that
some valuings are warranted and some are unwarranted?” With this ques-
tion, we enter more sophisticated levels of the epistemological issue. What I
shall present is John Dewey’s answer, which it is convenient to divide into
three parts.
19. For a discussion of this psychology, and its survival in both linguistic philoso-
phy and existentialism, see Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken,
1971). The American pragmatists were early critics of just this psychology.
20. See, for example, “The Construction of Good,” chap. 9, in The Quest for
Certainty, in Later Works, vol. 4.

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1. In judging the outcome of an inquiry, whether it be an inquiry into what

are conventionally considered to be “facts” or into what are conventionally
considered to be “values,” we always bring to bear a large stock of both val-
uations and descriptions which are not in question in that inquiry.21 We are
never in the position imagined by the positivists of having a large stock of
factual beliefs and no value judgments and having to decide whether our
first value judgment is warranted, of having to infer our very first “ought”
from a whole lot of “ises.”
2. We neither have nor require one single “criterion” for judging warranted
assertibility in ethics any more than we do in any other area. In particular,
the authority of philosophy is not the authority of a field vested with knowl-
edge of such a criterion or set of criteria. As Dewey himself put it:
A philosophy has no private store of knowledge or methods for attaining

truth, so it has no private access to good. As it accepts knowledge and princi-
ples from those competent in science and inquiry, it accepts the goods that are
diffused in human experience. It has no Mosaic or Pauline authority of reve-
lation entrusted to it. But it has the authority of intelligence, of criticism of
these common and natural goods.22
3. With the appearance of the term ‘intelligence’ we come to the last part of
Dewey’s answer to the “By what criteria?” question. If Dewey does not be-
lieve that inquiry requires “criteria,” in the sense of algorithms or decision
procedures, either in the sciences or in daily life, he does believe that there
are some things that we have learned about inquiry in general from the con-
duct of inquiry. In our writing on Dewey, Ruth Anna Putnam and I have
insisted that if one thing distinguishes Dewey as an ethicist or a meta-ethi-
cist (the whole normative ethics/meta-ethics distinction tends to collapse for
pragmatists), it is his emphasis on the importance of, and his consistent ap-
21. The fullest statement of Dewey’s account is his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in
Later Works, vol. 12. A terse statement is his Theory of Valuation, in International
Encyclopedia of Unified Science, ed. Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles W.
Morris, vol. 2, no. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939). See also Hilary
Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, “Dewey’s Logic: Epistemology as Hypothesis,” in
Words and Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

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plication of, the idea that what holds good for inquiry in general holds for value
inquiry in particular.23
But what does hold good for inquiry in general? We have learned,
Deweyans insist, that inquiry which is to make full use of human intelli-
gence has to have certain characteristics, including the characteristics which
I have elsewhere referred to by the phrase “the democratization of inquiry.”24
For example, intelligent inquiry obeys the principles of what Habermasians
call “discourse ethics”; it does not “block the paths of inquiry” by preventing
the raising of questions and objections, or obstructing the formulation of
hypotheses and criticism of the hypotheses of others. At its best, it avoids
relations of hierarchy and dependence; it insists upon experimentation
where possible, and observation and close analysis of observation where ex-
periment is not possible. By appeal to these and kindred standards, we can
often tell that views are irresponsibly defended in ethics as well as in science.
Not everyone will be convinced, I know. Some of the undergraduates in
a class I taught recently suggested that belief in giving reasons and actually
observing how various ways of life have functioned in practice, what the
consequences have been, discussing objections, etc., is just “another form of
fundamentalism”! The experience of these students with real fundamental-
ism must be rather limited. Anyone who has seen real fundamentalists in
action knows the difference between insisting on observation and discussion
and the repressive and suppressive mode of conducting discussion that is
characteristic of fundamentalism. But in any case I think that this objection
was both anticipated and adequately responded to by the founder of prag-
matism, Charles Sanders Peirce, in his famous essay “The Fixation of
Belief.”25 The discovery that inquiry which is to be successful in the long run
requires observation and experimentation and public discussion of the re-
sults of that observation and experimentation is not something a priori, but
is itself something that we learned from observation and experimentation
with different modes of conducting inquiry: from the failure of such meth-
23. In addition to the paper with R. A. Putnam cited in note 21, see Realism with a
Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), and H. Putnam and
R. A. Putnam, “Education for Democracy,” in Putnam, Words and Life.
24. See my “Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity,” in Words and Life.
25. “The Fixation of Belief,” in Collected Papers, vol. 5.

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ods as the method of tenacity, the method of authority, and the method of
appeal to allegedly a priori reason.
Conclusion
I said at the outset that the distinction between science and nonscientific
knowledge is a fuzzy one. But even the two cases that I have considered, the
science-related case (choosing between theories in advance of any crucial
experiment or when a crucial experiment is not possible) and the case of
social ethics illustrate one aspect of the distinction: while judgments of rea-
sonableness (coherence, plausibility, simplicity, and the like) are presup-
posed by science, they are not often thematized by science, whereas in the
“nonscientific” case they are likely to be the explicit subject matter of our
controversies and discussions. Textbooks of physics do not very often con-
tain statements to the effect that one theory is more “reasonable” than an-
other (although in periods of scientific “revolution” they may), whereas es-
says on ethical and political questions constantly contain claims of this sort.
I have argued that judgments of reasonableness can be objective. That
does not mean that they are totally independent of what human beings can
know and do; “reasonableness” means reasonableness for human beings, and
invariably for human beings in a particular context. On the other hand, the
view that there is “no more” to reasonableness than what a particular culture
believes leads immediately to paradox; for since our own culture does not
believe that cultural relativism is correct as a general view of truth and justi-
fication, it follows from cultural relativism itself that cultural relativism is
neither true nor justified! (Rorty, of course, hopes to change this awkward—
from his point of view—state of affairs, but I don’t think he will succeed.) In
brief, reasonableness is relative to context, including culture, but not simply
what a culture takes to be reasonable. Also, I have argued in various books
and papers, and again in good pragmatist fashion, that the fact that we can-
not reduce reasonableness to an algorithm does not mean that we cannot say
a good deal about it.
I mentioned at the outset that I have been writing and lecturing about
these topics for over two decades. There is one topic that I have invariably
discussed in my courses which has not yet entered into my discussion in
this essay, and I want to rectify that omission right now. I have always dis-

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cussed at some length the curious fashion in which recent disputes about
the objectivity of meaning facts (viz. the “indeterminacy of translation”)
exactly parallel the older disputes about the objectivity of value claims, par-
ticularly of ethical claims. Interestingly, almost every move that has ever
been made in the meta-ethical dispute has been repeated in the dispute over
Quine’s claim that there are no meaning facts. Corresponding, for example,
to the utilitarian attempt to give ethics objectivity by reducing ethical claims
to natural-scientific claims (e.g., claims about “pleasure,” thought of as
something we would eventually be able to measure), are the attempts by
such philosophers as Fred Dretske and Jerry Fodor to reduce meaning
claims to claims about causal-probabilistic covariation. (The idea being
that, in some way, the fact that ‘cat’ refers to cats, or that ‘cat’ means cat,
can be reduced to the alleged fact that “tokenings” of the word ‘cat’ covary
with occurrences of cats, or to the alleged fact that there is a “nomic con-
nection” between tokenings of ‘cat’ and a property of Cathood.) And corre-
sponding to the noncognitivist strategy of denying that there is such a thing
as an ethical fact is the Quinian strategy of denying that there is any such
thing as a meaning fact. Ethical claims are just expressions of feeling, for the
emotivists; meaning claims are just expressions of a decision to translate a
discourse one way rather than another—a decision which may be conve-
nient or inconvenient, but not scientifically right or wrong, for Quine. (Of
course, Quine also believes that there are no ethical facts, and he has ex-
pressed skepticism about “confirmation”—that is, the objectivity of scien-
tific justification. What keeps him from total skepticism is only his positiv-
ist faith in prediction as the sole touchstone of objectivity.)26
In sum, if ethical questions are not the subject matter of a special science,
they have a surprising number of “companions in the guilt.” Justification,
coherence, simplicity, and now meaning and reference all exhibit the same
problems that ethical predicates do from an epistemological point of view.
Nor is this something to be wondered at; for like ethical predicates all of
them have to do with reasonableness: reasonableness in action, in belief, and
in interpretation. And it is the refusal to tolerate any sort of objectivity that
is not underwritten by a grand metaphysical narrative that leads to the cor-
rosive skepticism that we find with respect to each of them in at least some
26. See my “The Last Logical Positivist,” in Realism with a Human Face.

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fashionable quarters today. (In this respect, “postmodernism” is often just

the skeptical face of the metaphysical itch.)
In 1982 I published a paper called “Beyond the Fact/Value Dichotomy”
that I read to the first meeting of my course Non-Scientific Knowledge each
time I give the class.27 It has become, so to speak, my “manifesto,” and I shall
close with a few sentences adapted from it:
Where are we then? On the one hand, the idea that science (in the sense of
exact science) exhausts rationality is seen to be a self-stultifying error. The very
activity of arguing about the nature of rationality presupposes a notion of
rationality wider than that of laboratory testability. If there is no fact of the
matter about what cannot be tested by deriving predictions, then there is no
fact of the matter about any philosophical statement, including that one. On
the other hand, any conception of rationality broad enough to embrace phi-
losophy—not to mention linguistics, mentalistic psychology, history, clinical
psychology, and so on—must embrace much that is vague, ill-defined, no
more capable of being “scientized” than was the knowledge of our ancestors.
The horror of what cannot be “methodized” is nothing but method fetishism.
It is time we got over it. Getting over it would reduce our intellectual hubris.
We might even recover our sense of mystery; who knows?28
27. Reprinted in ibid.

28. Ibid., 140.

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5
Weaving Seamless Webs
Ruth Anna Putnam
ON A HOT sleepy summer day an old truck rattles along a dusty road. A
turnip falls off the truck; the truck does not stop. Perhaps the old man who
drives the truck does not know that the turnip fell off, or perhaps he does
not care. He values his time or his ease more than he values the turnip. We,
who know not only that turnips are nourishing but that many people go
hungry, may say that the man ought to have stopped to pick up the turnip.
According to the prevailing view, the turnip fell off the truck regardless of
whether anyone knows that it fell off. According to the prevailing view, tur-
nips are nourishing regardless of whether anyone knows that they are nour-
ishing; but that turnips are nourishing is a fact relative to us. Strictly speak-
ing, turnips are nourishing for omnivores. According to the prevailing view,
these hard facts (absolute and relative) are to be distinguished from values
(i.e., really valuings). Turnips have value only if human beings value them,
only if they choose to eat them or to feed them to their domestic animals;
the man’s not caring is wrong only if we care about people going hungry.
All this is vague; it is a mere gesturing in the direction of the fact/value
distinction, or the science/morality distinction, or the description/pre-
scription distinction. It is not necessary for me to be clearer than this, for
my aim in this essay is to defend the view that nonmoral facts and moral
facts are so intimately interwoven that the distinctions alluded to will bear
hardly any philosophical weight at all; in particular, they will not support
moral skepticism.

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The first contrast between science and morality to which moral skeptics
point is that nature presents us with facts but not with moral values, and
they conclude from this that there are no moral values at all. But we need
moral values and moral rules to provide us with certain kinds of reasons—
moral reasons—for choosing and acting, although there are other kinds of
reasons and causes and motives as well. We need to appeal to moral rules as
excuses when our moral actions have untoward consequences. We need to
cite moral values when we want to exhort others to act in accordance with
moral laws. Most importantly, we need values to provide the foundation for
the complicated moral-legal-political structure without which human soci-
ety would be impossible; being both gregarious and political animals, we
need human society both to live and to flourish.
Since unaided nature does not provide us with moral values, we must do
for moral values what we do in other cases when unaided nature fails to
provide what we need: we must ‘make’ moral values. We do so whenever we
choose to act and even when we choose not to act; we cannot escape the
responsibility of making values. To be sure, often the ‘making’ is a mere re-
affirming; we do not spend our lives in agonizing moral quandaries. Often
we do the morally right thing almost as habitually as we take the right road
when we drive to work each morning. Often we know that it is weakness of
will rather than moral doubt which causes us to violate the moral norms into
which we were socialized. But if we do the latter often enough and if enough
other people do the same thing, the norms will change, and a new moral
value will have been created. Think, for example, of the widespread accep-
tance of drug use in our culture. Sometimes more and more people, more
and more deliberately, will flout an old norm; perhaps it does not fit an al-
tered world or perhaps we have simply lost all understanding of the reasons
for it. We tolerate now a wide range of ‘life styles’ that would have been
condemned in the past.
Not all moral change increases moral laxity; as a result of deliberate chal-
lenges to old norms, we are less viciously racist and sexist than we used to be.
Beyond that, reflective persons confront both, in their own lives, and, at
second hand, live, forced, and momentous moral choices. Some of these are
due to new technologies (e.g., discoveries in medicine which enable us to
prolong life); some are due to new political situations (e.g., the dissolution

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W E AV I NG SE A M L E SS W E BS 73
of the British Empire). Sometimes old problems return to haunt us after we

thought that they had been laid to rest: having captured a war criminal and
mass torturer, the French wondered whether to revive the death penalty.
Most moral problems are of various familiar sorts; but there are no algo-
rithms for solving them.
The thought that moral values are relative to us not simply as a species
with a certain kind of biological and psychological make-up but as beings
who could have made and can still make choices that are quite different
from those we have made is a source of anguish to many reflective persons.
It has driven some back to fundamentalist religions; it has caused others to
erect secular faiths of comparable rigidity. In some it produces a strange
mixture of rebellion and despair which may be summed up by saying, “If
God is dead, everything is permissible—how great! If everything is permis-
sible, nothing is worth doing—how dreadful!” For many of us none of these
responses are acceptable. Are we then condemned to take seriously what we
know to be an ‘arbitrary’ morality (arbitrary because dependent on our
choices, arbitrary because made by us rather than revealed by God or im-
planted by Nature or discovered by a pure practical Reason)?
We make moral values because we need moral values, just as we make
other things which we need and which unaided nature fails to provide. We
make tools, we design and build machines, we cultivate plants and domesti-
cate animals. The characteristics of these things are not arbitrary. On the
contrary, our needs generate the constraints within which these things are
made and the standards by which they are evaluated. Thus, we make knives
because there are things which we need to cut; it will not do to tear them or
smash them, nor are we able to use our teeth on them. These needs are very
pervasive; people made knives a very long time ago, and people do so still.
People are constrained in their knife-making by the purposes for which they
make knives: knives are made for cutting; therefore, knives must be made of
a material which will take an edge and keep it for some time. People are
constrained in their knife-making by their other tools and techniques: Stone
Age people could not make knives of steel. An individual knife-maker is
constrained by what kinds of knives were made before; the possibility of
innovation is limited by tradition. New kinds of knives must ‘prove’ them-
selves in use in order to be approved. Normally knives are evaluated by how
well they cut; but we may discover that some knives are bad not because they
do not cut well but because the cutting they do had better be left undone.

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So we are exhorted to beat our swords into plowshares, and we outlaw

switchblades. Some knives, in contrast, are knives only by courtesy or con-
vention—butter knives, for example. Finally, it is worth noting that while
knives appear very early in human prehistory, the first human tool was less
specific; it is known as a chopper.
Similarly, when we make moral values because we need to live in a hu-
man society, because we need to cooperate with each other at least some-
what, this need generates some constraints: some lives must be ‘sacred’,
some agreements must be trustworthy, some originality must be permit-
ted, etc. There are other constraints: we make our moral choices within an
ongoing society; even the greatest moral inventors must appeal to some
old values or to some strong and widespread sentiments; the rest of us are
even more limited by what is already accepted. If we transgress the moral
conventions of our society, the result must be clearly ‘good’ if we are to
escape censure. To be sure, when we compare societies which are widely
separated in time or in space, we may be startled by the differences in what
are nevertheless recognizably moral values, responses to the need to find
one’s way through the tangle of human relationships and to ground and
justify a detailed moral-legal-political code. Similarly, stone knives differ
markedly from steel blades, yet both are recognizably knives and some of
the former are as sharp as the best of the latter. Just as we can evaluate
knives by how well they cut, so we can evaluate moral values by how well
they succeed in grounding stable human societies and in fostering human
flourishing. Just as we reject some kinds of knives because of what they
cut, so we may reject some kinds of moral values because of the kinds of
human societies in which they are realized, or because of the characters of
the people who embrace them, or because they do not fit coherently with
other values that we cherish. Just as some knives are knives only by cour-
tesy, some rules of behavior are obligatory only by social convention (rules
of etiquette). Finally, just as our first tools were not (strictly speaking)
knives, so our first values are not (strictly speaking) moral.
I have maintained both that an object, a state of affairs, or an action has
moral value only if it answers to a need and that not every lack is a need. My
colleague Ken Winkler has pointed out that moral skeptics may now appeal
to the fact/value distinction to raise an objection in the form of a dilemma.
Either nature (or God or a Kantian Reason) certifies some lack to be a need,
or the first evaluation of a lack as a need occurs before there are any con-

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straints on that evaluation. Since moral skeptics reject the first alternative
(and the kind of naturalism I wish to defend does so as well), I must con-
front the second horn of the dilemma. If nature does not certify any lack as
a need, then it seems that the construction of a web of needs and values—a
web within which any particular value is nonarbitrary because it is within
the web—cannot begin without an arbitrary starting point; but then the
whole web, and thus every part of it, is after all arbitrary. And if (as I shall
argue below) we cannot separate facts from values, scientific from moral
theories, that arbitrariness will infect all our beliefs as well as all our values.
We can, I think, avoid this conclusion by distinguishing between our
perception/description/evaluation of the newborn baby’s situation (an eval-
uation which occurs within a framework of constraints) from the baby’s
sensations/reflexes (which occur prior to all constraints). We may say, “The
baby is hungry, needs food, should suck,” but the baby does not reflect; its
body simply is in a certain state and responds. If the baby (as we say) is lucky,
the response provides nourishment and becomes reinforced. Using a differ-
ent terminology and recalling the difference between choppers and knives,
we may say that food and sucking are the baby’s first values and norms; but
they are not yet moral values and moral norms. The baby’s first reflective
response to the world comes sufficiently later that some constraints have al-
ready developed and are so diffuse that not much constraint is needed.
But now some moral skeptics may point out that the baby’s biological needs,
even the baby’s biological and emotional needs, are too slender a basis for the
construction of a complete world view, or even for relatively simple mun-
dane moral choices. For we were all babies, yet some of us choose to help old
ladies carry their groceries while others choose to mug them; some of us
choose to serve science while others choose to serve God. No doubt, the
moral skeptics will continue, some of these choices can be justified by an
appeal to more fundamental values (provided we decided earlier to be coher-
ent or to have integrity), but must we not on pain of circularity, or an im-
possible infinite regress, arrive finally at choices which are woefully underde-
termined, and hence wholly ungrounded, by the baby’s needs? If so, what
has been said so far does not establish more than the most superficial unity

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of facts and values; it fails to meet the deeper thrust of the skeptic’s argu-
ment; it will not allay our anguish.
In 1918, Max Weber presented the view just alluded to in a lecture,
“Science as a Vocation,” at the University of Munich.1 The situation which
he presents so movingly to the young Germans of his time is our situation as
well. Weber sees us as confronting a choice between ultimately irreconcilable
fundamental attitudes toward life. He maintains that one cannot give any
justification for choosing a scientific rather than a religious stance toward the
world and, having chosen to be scientific, one cannot give any justification
for choosing one ultimate moral position rather than another.
I believe that Weber is mistaken. He is no doubt correct in holding that
one cannot, without circularity, give a rational justification for being mini-
mally rational. It is, however, far from clear that the minimal rationality
which is shared by scientists, poets, and religious folk is chosen, nor, if it
were chosen, who could ask for a justification of that choice. Every request
for justification presupposes a shared minimal rationality.
Because of the nature of his audience, Weber fails to distinguish be-
tween choosing science as a calling—a way of life and a way of making a
living—and choosing a scientific stance toward the world although one
makes one’s living as something other than a scientist. From a philosophi-
cal point of view, the interesting question is whether one can justify choos-
ing a scientific rather than a religious stance toward the world. One is
tempted to give such a justification by pointing to the great instrumental
value of science: science not only provides us with technology but teaches
us ways of thinking which will lead to new technologies in aid of new
goals, science enables us to calculate the cost of pursuing our goals, and
(Weber grants) as philosophy, science even enables us to see whether and
how our specific goals fit into our general Weltanschauung. But, Weber
maintains, these instrumental values of science are irrelevant to choosing a
scientific rather than a religious stance. Refusing to make the sacrifice of
the intellect which, Weber believes, is involved in any sincere religious
commitment can be justified only if it can be demonstrated that science
has intrinsic value; but that, Weber asserts, cannot be done. It cannot be
1. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed.
H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 129–157.

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done ‘scientifically’ on pain of circularity; it cannot be done from another

perspective on pain of incoherence.
Although Weber sounds often as if he would like to say that the religious
alternative is ruled out by the duty of intellectual integrity, he never quite
succumbs to that temptation. For Weber, a commitment to science and a
commitment to religion are not only irreconcilable but no reason can be
given for either commitment; one’s choice is, in this sense, arbitrary. Needless
to say, Weber chose science.
Weber seems to be in the grip of a picture that bears little resemblance to
real life. For few of us ever confront the choice between science and religion
as Weber conceives it, and none of us confront it with a mind that is a total
blank. Moses confronted that choice when he came upon a burning bush
which was not consumed by the flames. Moses walked around the bush, he
peered at it, he was ready to examine it more closely; his attitude to the bush
was scientific. Then God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, and Moses
chose to answer God’s call; but Moses did not make that choice in a cultural
vacuum, and his mind was not a moral blank. Moses belonged to a culture
in which claims to have received a direct communication from a deity were
not considered to be the marks of a madman. Moreover, what the deity to
whom Moses was willing to lend an ear demanded of Moses was something
which fitted into the pattern of his life, which cohered with earlier moral
choices he had made (his attack on the Egyptian slave driver)—a fact which
might have been viewed by Moses as ‘evidence’ that the burning bush was
indeed a miracle rather than a scientific curiosity. Similarly, our young con-
temporaries who choose science as a calling, who say, “Let us pursue knowl-
edge for the sake of knowledge with no ulterior purpose in mind,” do so
from within a culture in which it is widely believed that sooner or later all
knowledge will prove to be useful.
I do not know whether anyone in the days of Moses chose to sacrifice
faith on the altar of science (although we know of others, later, who chose to
sacrifice both faith and life); we do know that there are some in our days
who are prepared to make the “sacrifice of the intellect” which Weber asso-
ciated with a genuine religious commitment. Perhaps such persons will say,
with Weber, that they cannot and need not justify their commitment to us
in terms which we can understand. Nevertheless, I do not believe that either
they or we are reduced to a self-refuting relativism. They can attempt to
persuade us that theirs is a better perspective by appealing to moral values

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which we share (and to the minimal rationality which is presupposed by all

justification): they will claim that these values are more firmly supported by
their faith than they can ever be by any construction we can offer. We can
attempt to persuade them that these values stand a better chance to be real-
ized in a society which is committed to the full use of the most highly devel-
oped human intellect.
Most of us never confront a Weberian choice between science and reli-
gion. We have been trained to look at the world scientifically, or at least to
trust “what science tells us” long before we encounter anyone who questions
that perspective, and if we belong to some religious community as well, it is
one whose teachers are careful not to require a sacrifice of the intellect. In
short, given a shared minimal rationality and some shared moral values, we
can give reasons for our refusal to return to fundamentalist religion and for
our commitment to a basically scientific attitude toward the world. A com-
mitment to reason does not force us into the absurd position of having to
regard that commitment itself as arbitrary, as not defensible by reason.
Having chosen the scientific perspective, Weber maintains without further

argument that we are forced to choose between moral values which are as
irreconcilable and as incommensurable as are religious faith and a commit-
ment to the scientific stance and that science is unable to provide a justifica-
tion for such a choice. He asks, rhetorically, “What man will take upon
himself the attempt to ‘refute scientifically’ the ethic of the Sermon on the
Mount?”2 The moral problem to which Weber draws our attention is one
which can be stated without reference to a particular religious or scientific
perspective; it is a question which is particularly haunting in the face of great
injustice. It is the question “What means are permissible in resisting great
evil?” I do not know the answer to this question; I do not believe that there
is an eternal, transcendent answer to it. Unlike Weber, I claim that while
reasonable persons may differ concerning this matter, reasonable persons can
also ‘reason together’ about it on a case-by-case basis.
2. Ibid., 148.

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The appeal of fundamentalist religion rests, at least in part, on its claim

that it alone can provide a firm foundation for the moral values which in
turn will ground a stable society in which human beings can live and flour-
ish. Given the bewildering extent of moral disagreement in our society, given
that moral skepticism tends to be defended in the name of science (empiri-
cism), it is not sufficient to oppose arguments for a return to fundamentalist
religion by an appeal to science. Rather, one must show that, given a shared
scientific outlook, one can understand how reasonable persons may differ on
moral issues, how they may nevertheless respect each other, and how they
may reason with one another about these issues. Most importantly, one
must show that a reasonable tolerance does not condemn one to the absurd
position of being unable to condemn intolerance.
Tolerance implies neither moral skepticism nor moral indifference. We ex-
perience moral anguish most acutely and show, thereby, how seriously we take
moral values when we are forced to choose between conflicting and irreconcil-
able moral values. During World War II pacifists in the United States faced
such a choice. They had to decide whether to refuse to fight an enemy whom
they abhorred or to abandon a deeply held moral and religious commitment.
(There were pacifists in other countries, and there were nonreligious pacifists;
I ignore these facts for the sake of simplicity.) Without wanting in the least to
diminish the importance of the question which these men faced, without in
the least claiming that it need not have caused them great anguish (indeed, we
should think less of them had it not caused them anguish), I want to claim
that it was precisely because the decision was not arbitrary that it caused them
anguish. Because they belonged to religious communities which understood
‘Thou shalt not kill’ to prohibit participation in any war, these men did not
confront the simpler question, “Shall I respond to my country’s call in its hour
of need?” Because they belonged to a larger culture which valued patriotism
and certain liberal values denied by fascism, these men did not confront the
simpler question, “Shall I obey the dictates of my religion?” Moreover, because
fascism opposed the values held most high by their religious communities, to
some it was no longer clear that their elders’ interpretation of the command-
ment was correct; because their contemporaries were dying to preserve, among
other things, the very possibility of religious freedom, for some, fairness
seemed to require that they join the armed forces.
These men confronted this choice because they were born into a particular
religious community in the United States and because they were of draft age

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between 1941 and 1945. Although each chose for himself alone, he did so in the
knowledge that there were many like him. In short, the world, their perception
of the world, and the values they had already internalized combined to pose the
question for each of them in a certain way. Such prior facts and values do not
dictate an answer, they do not allay anguish, but they can prevent moral ver-
tigo and moral paralysis because they function among the reasons which these
men gave—to themselves, to their parents, to their relatives and friends, and
perhaps later to their children—for the choices they actually made. No doubt,
in the process of choosing, old values were examined and perhaps changed; but
they were not simply ignored and discarded. Whatever decision was made can
be evaluated later in terms of how it fit into the pattern of the man’s life until
the moment of decision and in terms of whether it provided a basis for con-
tinuing his life, whether he could ‘live with himself’, afterward.
What these men did, what all of us do at crucial moments in our lives
(but we must realize that such crucial moments are rare), is comparable to
the sort of thing Rawls does in his Theory of Justice.3 Rawls constructs a con-
ception of justice which is in reflective equilibrium with our most firmly
held particular judgments. That conception will then enable us to deal with
cases which we had found too difficult before (to deal with the impasse in
which liberal democratic society finds itself when it confronts conflicting
claims for liberty and equality). Similarly, pacifists in the Allied countries
during World War II had to bring some order into the haphazard collection
of values that they had acquired in their lifetimes in order to make the very
difficult decision whether and to what extent they were willing to participate
in the war effort. Just as Rawls’s concept of justice is subject to test—one can
see whether it is found useful in formulating particular policies, and if it is
so used, one can see what happens when these policies are carried out—so
the decision, say, to serve in a noncombatant capacity can be tested by seeing
what happens when it is put into practice. When I speak of what happens
when policies are carried out or decisions are put into practice, I once again
refer to ‘facts’ and to ‘values’. Something will happen which we will both
describe and evaluate, but the description and the evaluation will not be
independent of each other.
3. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1971).

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Some chose noncombatant service. If such a man then served as a

stretcher-bearer on the battlefield and felt that thereby he remained true to his
faith while also helping those who defended his freedom of faith and if his
family, proud of his courage, were able to accept this ‘compromise’, then one
is inclined to say that he made the right decision. Another man, having made
the same choice and having received a similar assignment, may have been
tormented by guilt—seeing himself as lacking the moral courage to go to jail
while counting as nothing the physical courage which he displayed—and un-
able to continue his life in his community. Perhaps such a man made the
wrong decision. I use the expressions ‘one is inclined to say’ and ‘perhaps’ be-
cause these judgments are tentative: only within the frame of a whole life, and
sometimes only within the frame of the life of a whole community, can these
decisions be evaluated. I skirt here dangerous ground, for I do not wish to
discuss the issues raised by Bernard Williams when he speaks of moral luck.4
My point is rather that just as from the perspective of some shared moral val-
ues we are able to defend our preference for the scientific over the fundamen-
talist religious stance, so from within the shared scientific perspective—the
willingness to regard what happens as relevant to a reappraisal of values—we
can defend our moral choices. Even this formulation is misleading. It suggests
on the one hand a more thoroughgoing consequentialism than I am willing to
adopt: consequences are relevant but not decisive. It suggests on the other
hand something like a ‘fast shuffle’ from the moral to the scientific point of
view and back again; I am denying that there are such independent points of
view; rather, what enables us to evaluate our values (including our valuing a
naturalism which leaves room both for science and for religious sensibilities) is
that they are part of a seamless web of facts and values.
It may be thought that this account of a morality (more correctly of a total

belief system) is too individualistic, that it ignores the vast contribution
which society makes to an individual’s most firmly held standing beliefs and
4. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981),

in the title essay.

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moral convictions. That impression is due to the fact that I have concen-
trated on the cases of individuals who face a moral choice in a situation in
which (for them) no prior value or prior norm determines a correct answer.
(Textbooks in moral philosophy standardly consider moral dilemmas where
whatever the agent does he will have done wrong; I deliberately chose a case
where whatever the agent does he may have done right.) Nevertheless, such
questions are posed within an existing moral framework, within a widely
shared morality. It is a morality which one has acquired along with most of
one’s other standing beliefs from one’s parents, one’s teachers, the books one
has read, etc. No doubt, from one’s first “No!” and “Why?” on, one begins
to transform what would otherwise be a purely conventional morality into a
reflective one; but reflection is reflection on the prevailing morality and
leaves most of it intact. Nevertheless, reflection is important and inevitable.
Reflection is important because it makes moral change possible; reflection is
inevitable because even the most detailed moral code fails to prescribe con-
duct for all eventualities. Enormously difficult questions lurk here: moral
autonomy, the moral authority of the community, the limits to freedom of
conscience and the justified demands for a stable society are all at issue; but
these are matters which lead far beyond the confines of this essay.
Consider, again, two members of a pacifist religious community. Going
to jail may be the right thing for Peter, whose deep faith will sustain him and
enable him to be a source of comfort to his fellow prisoners whatever their
faith or the reasons for their incarceration; it would have been wrong for
John. John would have seen his years in prison as wasted; he would have
become embittered and ultimately even have lost his faith. Is this not pure
subjectivism? What has become of the impersonal moral point of view and
of moral principles? In what sense is Peter a model for us?
Some of these questions are clearly misconceived. To say that one’s char-
acter constrains one’s choice of how to follow a moral principle is no more
subjectivist than to insist that the size of one’s feet constrains one’s choice
of a pair of shoes. Peter is a model for us and John is not precisely because
Peter chooses a course of action which he can sustain, which he can reaf-
firm day after day, because (at least as far as this choice is in question) he
knows himself.
But, of course, that is not enough. Integrity is not enough, consistency is
not enough, universality is not enough. “It is impossible to construct a moral
view from these virtues alone; being virtues of form they are in a sense sec-

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ondary,” says Rawls.5 What makes Peter a model for us is also the fact that he
chose in the light of the principle “Thou shalt not kill”—a principle which
we too accept even if our interpretation differs from Peter’s.
The American pacifist’s moral dilemma arose partly from a clash of values,
and partly from the interpretation he gave to those values. He had affirmed
both the values of his religious community and the liberal values of his coun-
try; but now the former demanded trust in God (only) while the latter de-
manded trust in arms (as well as God). Members of other religious commu-
nities did not interpret the commandment against killing as prohibiting all
wars and, thus, did not experience the same clash of values nor the same
anguish. Someone might now wish to say that I have drawn attention to a
not negligible difference between science and morality: even if we grant that
both scientific data and moral values are objective in the same sense (what-
ever that sense may be; this is a question which I do not intend to pursue
here), and even if we also grant that both scientific data and moral values are
interpreted by us (and this is to be taken as uncontroversial), clearly our in-
terpretations of the data of science are less various than our interpretations
of values. The difference, someone might say, is great enough to be a differ-
ence in kind. I am inclined to think that this last is a mistake; it is merely
testimony to our tendency to dichotomize continua. That there really is a
continuum is perhaps most clearly seen by taking a second look at the
Rawlsian conception of justice.
What follows is not an attempt to present, interpret, or evaluate Rawls’s
theory of justice. I refer to the theory simply as an example of the sort of
thing one would do if one were to contribute to the “weaving of the seamless
web of facts and values” on the level of political philosophy. Specifically, I
want to draw attention to the fact that Rawls’s construction involves social
theory in two ways. On the one hand, the parties in the original position are
supposed to have general social science facts at their disposal; in other words,
since the parties model us when we reason most fairly about distributive
justice, social science and political morality are inextricably interconnected
in our best reasoning. On the other hand, Rawls himself in developing his
theory uses social science (economics, decision theory, and some psychol-
ogy) as well as his own considered moral judgments and the (partly incom-
5. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 519–520.

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patible, hence his problematique) principles of political and private morality

which characterize ours as a liberal democratic society. Even this is not the
end of the story. Testing a political philosophy, or a part of one, involves
proposing a policy which one believes has some chance of being adopted
and which is intended to solve some social problem. Social theory is as rele-
vant at this step as is one’s conception of justice. If the policy is adopted and
put into practice, one must then interpret and evaluate the result. Again,
both social theory, one’s conception of justice, and, probably, other moral
values come into play. Given a relatively open society and competing con-
ceptions of justice (or of some other social value), a variety of social experi-
ments may be carried out at the same time. Examples of such experiments
are the varieties of agricultural villages in Israel or the varieties of schools in
the United States. I have stressed the importance of social theory in Rawls’s
construction of justice. In his own discussion of the roles of social theory
and moral conceptions, he emphasizes the importance of the latter.6 I do not
believe that this difference in emphasis reflects a fundamental disagreement;
there is more than one way to map a continuum.
Nozick’s libertarianism, Rawls’s liberalism, and a Marxian conception of
democracy elaborate incompatible conceptions of social justice: they lead to
opposing evaluations and to divergent policy recommendations. But the au-
thors of these views and we who are choosing between them can and do
justify our choice by appealing to other values and to psychological-
sociological-political-historical experience and theory as well. Conversely,
what those experiences and those theories are depends on the values (moral
and political) of the individual scientist and of the society which supports
her work. What questions we ask (“Why is the level of unemployment
among blacks higher than among whites?” or “Why is the level of unem-
ployment higher in the inner cities than in the suburbs?”), what sort of re-
search we do in an attempt to find an answer (e.g., on what level of general-
ity), what experiments we permit (for centuries the dissecting of human
cadavers was prohibited), etc., influence the content of science, however
‘objective’ that content may be.7
6. John Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” Journal of Philosophy

77, no. 9 (1980): especially 534–535 and 565–567.
7. Alan Garfinkel, Forms of Explanation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1981).

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Although I have emphasized the mutual dependence of morality and so-

cial science, it does not take much imagination to see how the arguments
might be extended to encompass the whole of science. Moreover, scientific
information is relevant on all levels of moral reasoning. There is indeed a
seamless web of science and morality because, in our reasoning, they do not
play separable roles. In practice, we are aware of only limited parts of that
web, a fact which leads Morton White to speak of “limited corporatism”;
but in principle, the web encompasses all.8 It will not do to object that surely
we can distinguish between paradigmatic theoretical judgments in physics
and paradigmatic practical judgments in everyday morality, for one does not
deny that continua have endpoints; one denies that there are discontinuities.
Theories in the social sciences predict what values are realizable and
thus influence what values we are inclined to affirm and attempt to realize.
Anthropological theories which emphasize cultural relativism and cultural
incommensurability are often taken by philosophers to support moral
skepticism. Moral skepticism in so far as it emphasizes irresolvable (by
reasoning) value-conflicts makes it easier to substitute force for reason; it
discourages beating swords into ploughshares. What follows from a desire
to reason together is neither the suppression of anthropology nor the ab-
sorption of all smaller communities in a grand human community. Given
(as Aristotle taught us) that we need to live in a community in order to
flourish and given that we need shared values in order to have a commu-
nity, my colleague Michele Moody-Adams has questioned whether there
can be enough cross-cultural agreement (or even cross-subcultural agree-
ment) on what counts as human flourishing to enable us to reach agree-
ment on the sort of all-human community we wish to build. Thus, need-
ing community to be fully human but being unable to form one inclusive
community, we are forced, for the sake of human survival, to be tolerant
and to seek communication.
Having said this, someone will ask whether I envisage channels of com-
munication between slave owners and slaves, between fascists and Jews, be-
tween torturers and their victims. What prompts that question is, I think, a
lively appreciation of the fact that our condemnation of the slave owners, the
8. Morton White, What Is and What Ought to Be Done (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1981).

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fascists, and the torturers is much more immediate, much more certain,
than any reason we might give in support of these condemnations. What
prompts the question is also the fear that the Deweyan sort of naturalism
which I have defended, precisely because I have emphasized the centrality in
that position of tolerance as a moral value, will, in the end, leave us in the
absurd position of tolerating the most extreme intolerance, an intolerance
which denies the humanity of some human beings.
One is tempted to respond to this objection by denying full humanity to
slave owners, fascists, and torturers. That, I think, would be a mistake.
Perhaps all torturers are psychopaths, morally dead in the language of
Menkiti, and thus unable to respond to the appeal “Let us reason together”;
but most slave owners and fascists were not psychopaths, yet they shared the
racism and antisemitism which made the horrors of chattel slavery and the
gas chambers possible.9 Our problem, as philosophers, is to confront the ad-
vocates of slavery and fascism (and other ideologies which deny the human-
ity of some human beings or require their adherents to subject some human
beings to inhuman treatment) and to seek some place—not an external
Archimedean point—where their web of facts and values touches ours and
from which we can attempt to unravel theirs and persuade them to weave
ours. As ordinary men and women we confront the question raised by Weber:
how does one deal with very great evil? That is a question on which reason-
able persons may and do differ: here tolerance is not amiss; rather, tolerance
and moral creativity are desperately needed.
Note
Work on this essay was supported in part by a Fellowship from the

National Endowment for the Humanities for 1982–1983.
9. Ifeanyi Menkiti, “The Resentment of Injustice: Some Consequences of

Institutional Racism,” Philosophical Forum 9 (1977–1978): 227–249.

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6
Rorty’s Vision
Philosophical Courage and Social Hope
Ruth Anna Putnam
IN “FEMINISM AND PRAGMATISM,” the third of Rorty’s four essays on

“Moral Progress: Toward More Inclusive Communities” in Truth and Progress,
the third volume of his Philosophical Papers, Rorty mentions approvingly
Marilyn Frye’s identification of imagination and courage; in his words, “Such
courage is indistinguishable from the imagination it takes to hear oneself as the
spokesperson of a merely possible community, rather than as a lonely, and
perhaps crazed, outcast from an actual one.”1 Rorty, it seems to me, has that
courage. He had that courage when, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he
imagined an edifying philosophy in place of the endless dialogue between
skeptics and their realist opponents that has dominated modern philosophy
since Descartes; and he has that courage now when he imagines, in Truth and
Progress and even more so in Achieving Our Country, an active, reformist, social
democratic, liberal left in place of the quietist academic left that fills our uni-
versities; he has that courage when he imagines knowledge replaced by hope.2
1. Richard Rorty, Philosophical Papers, vol. 3: Truth and Progress (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998), 215.
2. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1979); Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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In this essay I mean to comment on the four essays on moral/political

philosophy in Truth and Progress. However, for two quite distinct reasons, I
believe that one cannot do justice to Rorty if one restricts one’s attention to
these topics.3 Rorty has undertaken to defend an old-fashioned social dem-
ocratic liberalism against postmodernism, but many readers will say that
Rorty’s own writings are among the sources of postmodernism in the
American academy. I shall try to show that this impression—the impression
that Rorty is himself a postmodernist, or a relativist, or an irrealist—is not,
or at any rate not entirely, correct. To be sure, he has often contributed to
creating this impression. I shall begin, then, with a discussion of Rorty’s
metaphilosophy.
Cornel West speaks of the American evasion of philosophy by which he

means that the evasion of epistemology has been a dominant theme in
American philosophy at least since Emerson.4 The phrase is particularly apt
of Rorty’s project in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, for in that work he
identified philosophy with epistemology in the widest sense. He wrote,
“Philosophy as a discipline thus sees itself as the attempt to underwrite or
debunk claims to knowledge made by science, morality, art or religion.”5
Since it is often tempting to see Rorty’s own work as attempts to debunk
knowledge claims, it will be worth our while to remember this characteriza-
tion of philosophy, that is, of the sort of philosophy—he called it “system-
atic philosophy”—that he hoped to replace by what he called then “edifying
philosophy.”
3. It is worth mentioning that since writing these moral/political essays that we find
in Truth and Progress, he has given the Massey Lectures at Harvard (that, together with
two earlier talks, make up Achieving Our Country). Those lectures display more vividly
the moral passion that animates Rorty and spell out more clearly what he means by
substituting hope for knowledge; thus, they throw a retrospective light on the topics I
mean to consider here.
4. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
5. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror, 3.

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RORT Y ’S V ISION 89
In fact, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and in the greater part of
his work since, Rorty has produced neither systematic nor edifying philoso-
phy; he has produced metaphilosophy. “I enjoy metaphilosophy,” he con-
fesses and attempts more than once to interpret what others might see as
philosophical disagreements in metaphilosophical terms.6 It is not clear to
me, however, that this strategy constitutes an evasion of systematic philoso-
phy. To be sure Rorty debunks questions rather than knowledge claims, but
it is not unreasonable to think that by debunking the question “What can
we say to the skeptic?” he has debunked all possible answers, thus leaving the
skeptic victorious. It is not unreasonable, but it is not what Rorty intends.
Let us remember that he has also debunked the skeptic’s question “How do
we know . . . ?”—thus leaving no one in the field. That field is then filled, in
so far as it is filled by Rorty, by metaphilosophy, on the one hand, and polit-
ical philosophy, on the other. While replacing epistemology by political phi-
losophy is in the spirit of Dewey’s injunction to replace the problems of the
philosophers by the problems of human beings, I fail to find metaphiloso-
phy less systematic or more edifying than epistemology.7
Rorty’s metaphilosophy is also identified as pragmatism, although it is
often not what James and Dewey said but rather “what Dewey might have
said, and in my view should have said, rather than what he did say.”8 I think
this is true not only of what Rorty writes about Dewey in “Dewey between
Hegel and Darwin” but of many of his remarks elsewhere.9 I share Rorty’s
admiration for Dewey; I would not express my admiration by telling Dewey
what he should have said.
What Rorty has to say about knowledge and truth—and in this respect
he resembles his great predecessors—bears on his moral philosophy, and his
political convictions played a role in his finding pragmatism a congenial
(meta)philosophy. Defending himself against the charge of “light-minded
aestheticism” Rorty claimed a “moral purpose”—namely, “It helps make the
6. Rorty, Truth and Progress, 119.

7. John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” in Middle Works, 10:1–
48. Dewey wrote, “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing
with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers,
for dealing with the problems of men” (46).
9. Rorty, “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin,” in ibid., 290–306.

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world’s inhabitants more pragmatic, more tolerant, more liberal, more re-
ceptive to the appeal of instrumental rationality.”10
I turn then to a brief attempt to distinguish Rorty’s pragmatism from
postmodernism, to show that while he thinks searching for foundations of
knowledge is a waste of time, he does not deny that we have knowledge.
That knowledge requires foundations is an assumption shared by skeptics
and their realist targets. Rorty rejects that assumption. Consequently his
critique of various attempts to provide such foundations does not under-
mine the possibility of knowledge. Indeed, he wrote, “I think you can have
knowledge—objective knowledge—without representation, realism, or cor-
respondence.”11
But how can Rorty deny, how can anyone deny, that knowledge requires
foundations? Only by developing a conception of knowledge that differs
radically from the familiar Cartesian notion, but not merely a different con-
ception of knowledge. We need to see ourselves and our place in the world
differently. We need to replace the image of ourselves as spectators, or the
image of the mind as a mirror of nature, by an image of ourselves as agents,
as organisms that interact with their environment. We will also need to give
up the image of true beliefs as accurate representations (mirror images) of
the world.
Both James and Dewey point out that “correspondence” in “truth is cor-
respondence to reality” refers to different relations in different contexts, and
when they unpack “correspondence,” they leave one with something that is
definitely not “the correspondence theory of truth.” The crucial element in
that theory, as it is understood both by its adherents and by Rorty, is the
assumption that there is a way the world is independent of how we think (or
say) it is; true beliefs then are said to correspond to that way. So when Rorty
rejects the correspondence theory, when he denies that there is a reality that
is independent in that way, or that the notion of such a reality makes sense,
some of his critics have inferred that he denies the existence of anything
causally independent of human beings. He responds, “To say that the world
is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that
10. Richard Rorty, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 193.
11. Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., ed., Rorty and Pragmatism (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt
University Press, 1995), 50.

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most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include
human mental events.”12 So when the critic says that “There are mountains
in Jordan” is true “in virtue of the way things are,” Rorty agrees, provided
that “in virtue of the way things are” is understood as “in virtue of the way
our current descriptions of things are used and the causal interaction we
have with these things”; he disagrees if it means “simply in virtue of the way
things are, quite apart from how we describe them.”13 He rejects the latter
because there is no way of describing the way things are independently of
describing them, no way to distinguish the role played by our language and
the role played by the rest of the universe “in accounting for the truth of our
true beliefs.”14 Consequently, Rorty follows Davidson in denying the
scheme-content distinction. This means that we cannot distinguish between
appearance (the for-us) and reality (the in-itself ), but we can (indeed we
must) distinguish between “is” and “seems”; the latter distinction “applies to
objects under a description, whereas ‘in itself ’-‘for us’ is an attempt to distin-
guish between an object under no description and a described object.”15
I hope I have made abundantly clear that in nonphilosophical contexts,
Rorty can speak of truth and falsehood just as the rest of us do. One should
not be misled by the fact that Rorty has referred to “true” as “a compliment
paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other
sentences which are doing so.”16 “A compliment paid to sentences”—can one
imagine that being said without a condescending sneer? I believe this unfor-
tunate and careless formulation was meant to point to what he calls the
“endorsing” use of “true.” Perhaps endorsements are compliments, but they
are neither cheap nor empty, for they commit one, should the occasion arise,
to a wide range of behavior. Endorsing is only one use of “true” recognized
by Rorty’s “minimalist” view; there are also the cautionary (“although all the
evidence so far confirms this, it may not be true”) and the disquotational
uses. The negative point is that “true” has no explanatory use. But Rorty
12. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge

14. Ibid., 87.
15. Ibid., 88n9.
16. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of M
in-
nesota Press, 1982), xxv.

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admits that he oscillates between this view and wanting to reduce truth to
justification (to ever-larger audiences). He rejects the latter view, when he
does so, because of what he calls “Putnam’s ‘naturalistic fallacy’ argument”:
given any proposition justified to any actual audience, we can always imag-
ine a larger (later?) audience to which it will not be justified.17 There is no
ideal audience, justification to which would be truth. Nevertheless Rorty
speaks often of justification to larger and larger audiences, and that leads to
the complaint that, despite his explicit disavowals, Rorty is a relativist.
Rorty replies that he is not a relativist; he is an ethnocentrist. The relativ-
ist, who, like the realist, imagines that one can have a view from nowhere, “is
an ironic, sneering aesthete who refuses to take the choice between commu-
nities seriously”; in contrast, “To be ethnocentric is to divide the human race
into the people to whom one must justify one’s beliefs and the others.”18
Since fruitful conversation requires a basis of shared beliefs, one can have
such a conversation only with members of the first group. Ethnocentrism is
relatively uninteresting as long as the beliefs in question are scientific beliefs;
for, whatever else they may be in the eyes of realists, scientific beliefs are
beliefs that must be and can be justified to the (relevant section of ) the com-
munity of scientists. Ethnocentrism becomes controversial when one thinks
about politics; so we shall return to this topic below.
Before I turn to Rorty’s writings on political morality, I want to return to
the question of foundations. Rorty thinks that the only form of realism that
survives his critique is “uninteresting because it says only that the produc-
tion of true beliefs is a matter of causal relations between language users and
the rest of the universe, and that if either were different, their relations would
be different.”19 Since “only a belief can justify beliefs . . . this means reinter-
preting ‘experience’ as the ability to acquire belief noninferentially as a result
of neurologically describable causal transactions with the world.”20 Unlike
Rorty, I find this not only a sustainable form of realism but an interesting
one. I find Rorty’s suggestion that “Dewey should have dropped the term
‘experience,’ not redefined it” seriously misguided.21 Experience, that is,

18. Rorty, Objectivity, 30
20. Ibid., 141.
21. Ibid., 297.

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those interactions of an organism with its environment that cause beliefs are
simply what anchors one’s web of beliefs to the rest of the universe (includ-
ing the beliefs of others!), but those beliefs may be challenged and may be
rejected as may any others. In other words, they do not provide a “founda-
tion” of knowledge.
Rorty writes, “One of the benefits of getting rid of the notion of the intrinsic
nature of reality is that you get rid of the notion that quarks and human
rights differ in ‘ontological status.’”22 We can say that human rights are social
constructions, but then we must say the same thing about quarks. This is a
telling rejoinder to those philosophers who maintain that theoretical physics
comes close to describing the world as it “really” is but that nothing in reality
corresponds to human rights or other moral values. Nevertheless, I would
prefer to say that human rights are as little or as much social constructions
as are trees or pains. To be sure, talk of “violations of human rights” may
seem as remote from officially sanctioned rape and torture as are scientific
theories from our everyday experiences, but I want to resist a possible ten-
dency to think of human rights as “theoretical.” In so far as Rorty insists that
human rights do not have and do not need foundations, he too resists “the-
orizing” human rights. And while he has been at times reluctant to use hu-
man rights language, he never wavered in his opposition to torture and hu-
miliation.23
As early as Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty noted that both
foundationalists and antifoundationalists in moral philosophy agree that
“human beings have rights worth dying for.”24 They disagree on whether
there is something in us, say, a Kantian Reason, that is the foundation of our
rights and of our having responsibilities. He now thinks that “the question
whether human beings have the rights enumerated in the Helsinki
Declaration is not worth raising” and that “nothing relevant to moral choice
22. Ibid., 7.
23. See Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Objectivity, 175–196.
24. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror, 177.

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separates human beings from animals except historically contingent facts of

the world, cultural facts.”25
Why does he find it so important to make that point? He responds,
“We pragmatists argue from the fact that the emergence of the human
rights culture seems to owe nothing to increased moral knowledge, and
everything to hearing sad and sentimental stories, to the conclusion that
there is probably no knowledge of the sort Plato envisaged.”26 To clarify
what he has in mind Rorty asks, “Why does the attempt to found culture
on nature, and moral obligation on transcultural universals seem so much
less important to us than it seemed in the Enlightenment?”27 His short
answer is that Darwin has persuaded us that we are simply “exceptionally
talented animals” and that we are willing to accept the Darwinian view
because the “extraordinary increase in wealth, literacy, and leisure” among
“Europeans and Americans” has “made possible an unprecedented acceler-
ation in the rate of moral progress.”28 I must confess that I fail to follow
the argument. I will grant that we are exceptionally talented animals and
that during the past two hundred years Europeans and North Americans
have enjoyed an unprecedented increase in wealth, literacy, and leisure. I
can also see a connection between widespread literacy and a widespread
acceptance of Darwinism (or any other scientific view). I doubt, in view of
the multiple genocides and ethnic cleansings perpetrated since the
Enlightenment, that we can claim to have experienced “an unprecedented
acceleration in the rate of moral progress.” Finally, in so far as we have
made moral progress, I find the claim that this is not due to increased
moral knowledge problematic. For, unlike Rorty, I do not think of moral
knowledge as intuitions of a transempirical realm; so I take the (empirical)
belief that people tend to flourish more in societies in which human rights
are respected than in societies in which they are trampled upon to be a case
of moral knowledge. Surely that belief has contributed to the spread of
what Rorty in “Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality” calls the
human rights culture.29

26. Ibid., 172.
27. Ibid., 174.
28. Ibid., 174–175.
29. Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality,” in ibid., 167–185.

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Since we (Rorty’s readers and our friends) live in a human rights culture,
that is, since we take it for granted that human beings have certain rights,
Rorty concludes in the essay just mentioned that it is no longer necessary to
defend that claim. What then is left for philosophers to do? We need to
convince our nice students, who are already convinced that racial and reli-
gious prejudice is a terrible thing, that certain other characteristics, say, be-
ing gay, are also morally irrelevant. “You do this by manipulating their sen-
timents in such a way that they imagine themselves in the shoes of the
despised and oppressed.”30 If we could produce such people all over the
world, we would achieve an “Enlightenment Utopia.”
But we know very well that there are many people in the world whom our
sentimental stories will fail to convince. How are we to think of those peo-
ple? “Foundationalists think of these people as deprived of truth, of moral
knowledge. But it would be better—more concrete, more suggestive of pos-
sible remedies—to think of them as deprived of two more concrete things:
security and sympathy.”31 Rorty realizes that without physical and economic
security, it is difficult to listen to—that is, learn from—sentimental stories.
Thus, ultimately, we liberal intellectuals in the rich democracies will have to
turn our attention from philosophical conversations to practical politics.
Exactly that is the message of Achieving Our Country. For what needs to be
done is to halt and reverse the steady increase in inequality and insecurity.
Rorty reports the frightening statistics of the immiseration of 75 percent of
the American people and of 95 percent of the world’s population and calls
for a moratorium on theorizing.32 To become effective politically, leftist
members of the academy need to lay a basis for alliances with people outside,
especially with labor unions, by “proposing changes in the laws of a real
country, inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering,
much of which can be cured by governmental action.”33
I have presented what I perceive to be Rorty’s argument without interrup-
tion because I agree with and wish to emphasize his conclusion. I also think
that along the way he raises important considerations although I wish to
demur from some of his formulations.
30. Ibid., 179.

31. Ibid., 180.
32. Rorty, Achieving, 83–84.
33. Ibid., 99.

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I am troubled by Rorty’s claim that we live in a human rights culture. In

a world in which newspapers and television present us daily with the horrors
of human rights violations, in a world in which even in so liberal a democ-
racy as that of the United States people are executed in spite of vigorous
pleas for clemency, who lives in a human rights culture?34 In Achieving Our
Country Rorty gives generous credit to the cultural left for decreasing the
amount of sadism in America. Yet he also acknowledges that the veneer of
civility is thin, that it may easily crack if most people’s economic situation
deteriorates further. Even the moral progress that plays a key role in his ar-
gument turns out to be tainted: we freed the slaves only to enact segregation;
we started a welfare state only to fall far behind other industrial democracies;
we extended suffrage to all citizens but a frighteningly large percentage of
the eligible voters find the contest irrelevant; and the candidate with the
largest “war chest” is almost always the winner.35 Rorty identifies the mem-
ory of the Holocaust as a source of the present “human rights culture,” but
one wonders whether we should not think of ourselves rather as the geno-
cide culture; it all depends on who we take ourselves to include. Even we
citizens of the United States are not entitled to the self-congratulation im-
plicit in the claim that ours is a human rights culture.
I am puzzled by Rorty’s claim that only contingent cultural facts distin-
guish us from other animals. Not all contingent facts are cultural facts. Rorty
himself claims, “We can feel for each other to a much greater extent than they
can.”36 I wonder what evidence he has for this claim, but if it is true at all, it
will be true of all human beings. Like the ability to speak, the ability to feel
for each other is a transcultural ability that grounds our ability to form the
kind of self-shaping societies that, as far as we can tell, only human beings
form. Together with our ability to harm one another, these abilities explain
why animals like us invent human rights as particularly stringent limits on
morally permissible conduct. Nothing I have said invokes a transempirical
34. To be sure, the rhetoric of human rights seems to have spread all over the world.
Thus, recently, the newspaper showed on the front page heavily veiled Iranian women
demonstrating for the “human right” of Turkish women to be veiled in public! Neither
the women nor my nice liberal newspaper seemed to be aware that these demonstra-
tors did not have a “human right” to appear in public without a veil!
35. The first three examples are Rorty’s; the last is mine. See Rorty, Achieving, 106.

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foundation for human rights or denies that we are “merely” exceptionally

talented animals, but it embeds human rights in a web of values. That is
important, for when human rights conflict with each other, we need to de-
liberate, and for that we need to see how the rights in question are connected
to other things we value. It is not clear to me whether Rorty fails to consider
the possibility of conflicts of rights, or whether he is unable to deal with it
because he is unwilling to see human rights embedded in a larger context.
For Rorty, the only question worth asking about human rights is the ques-
tion “How can we persuade more people to include more ‘different’ people in
their moral community?” He believes that appeals to Platonic or Kantian
moral principles will fail and so, presumably, would appeals to our common
empirical nature. In contrast, appeals to sentiment in the form of stories that
will make our auditors understand what it is like to be, say, a homosexual may
succeed. I agree, of course, that appeals to sentiment sometimes help, but so,
perhaps with people of a different temperament, do appeals to moral principles
or, with yet others, religious appeals. But whatever the appeal, Rorty is surely
correct in holding that it will fall on deaf ears unless it is directed at people who
are sufficiently secure—safe from human enemies and from economic
disasters—to allow their sympathies or consciences to be aroused.37 Hence the
conclusion of Rorty’s argument that we must turn from philosophizing to
political activism in order to bring about those conditions of security.
In “Rationality and Cultural Difference,” Rorty reminds us that one sense of

the word “culture” is “a set of shared habits of action, those that enable
members of a single human community to get along with one another and
with the surrounding environment.”38 We use “culture” in that sense to refer
37. Rorty points out that we dislike depending on appeals to sentiment; we resent
depending on the good will of the rich and the powerful. For reasons that are not clear
to me, he thinks not only that that is all we have but that it is all we need. He forgets
that the victims need to retain their self-esteem; they cannot do that with sentimental
stories but by insisting that they have rights.
38. Rorty, “Rationality and Cultural Difference,” in Truth and Progress, 186–201,
188.

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to the culture of the inmates of a prison, to the culture of a people, say, the
Hopi, or to something quite large and varied as, for example, Christian cul-
ture. This sets up a tension. On the one hand, we think that certain cultures
ought not to exist (e.g., that of the Mafia). On the other hand, under the
influence of our own culture’s commitment to pluralism and tolerance, we
tend to think that all cultures are worthy of preservation. Rorty suggests that
we suffer the same tension with respect to species; we happily eradicate the
smallpox bacillus but draw up lists of endangered species in order to take
measures to protect them. There is, however, a disanalogy. The concept of
species is a relatively well-behaved scientific concept; the concept of a “cul-
ture” in the sense under discussion is extremely murky. Not only are the
borders between cultures always permeable, not only do virtually all human
individuals belong to more than one culture, but some cultures are the cul-
tures of communities that have existed for millennia, undergoing change
and yet being recognizably the same, while others are the cultures of short-
term voluntary or involuntary associations. Finally, some cultures flourish
within well-defined, though perhaps contested, geographical borders, while
the members of others are scattered all over the globe. Questions of preser-
vation of culture, especially in the face of competition in the same geograph-
ical region, raise difficult moral and political issues. Rorty is surely right
when he criticizes “contemporary leftist intellectuals” who find value only in
oppressed cultures, only in victims of imperialism, for to identify virtue
(moral or artistic or whatever) with powerlessness and poverty is just as ab-
surd as to identify it with power and wealth.39
If we are not to say that all long-lived cultures are equally good, and we
are not to say that the cultures of the former imperialist powers are, merely
in virtue of that fact, better or worse (we say both!) than the cultures of the
formerly colonized people, what are we to say and, more importantly, what
are we to do? Consider the Aborigines of Australia. On the one hand, it is
racist to deprive them of the sort of education that will enable them to be
successfully assimilated into the highly technological society of the over-
39. Rorty notes that in the United States cultural studies have become ‘victim
studies’, studies designed “to help victims of socially acceptable forms of sadism by
making such sadism no longer acceptable” (Achieving, 80). But, he continues, there are
no studies of the victims of economic selfishness; the homeless and the unemployed
are not the ‘other’ in the sense that interests the cultural left.

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whelmingly white majority. On the other hand, it is equally racist to think

that the culture of the white majority is the only culture worth having. What
sort of policy will make it possible for the Aborigines to preserve what they
value in their culture while at the same time opening for them doors to all
the advantages of a technologically advanced society that they may desire?
Rorty approaches this problem by suggesting that we imagine a future
social democratic utopia. “The unifying social ideal of this utopia would be
a balance between minimizing suffering . . . and tolerance of different ways
of living.” In such a utopia “there seems no particular reason to hope for
immortality for any contemporary set of cultural differences, as opposed to
hoping that it may eventually be supplanted by a new and more interesting
set.” He points out that we do not miss the cultures that were supplanted by
ours and claims that “nobody much cares whether the last Gaelic or Breton
speakers—or the last strict rhyme scheme poets or Palladian architects—die
out”; he suggests that we can contemplate with equanimity the end of
“Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and the secular humanism of the modern
West” because we have reason to think that they will not disappear until
“new cultures, of at least equal grandeur, are available to take their place.”40
This does not help me to think more clearly about the Aborigines or any
other indigenous people who are now demanding an equal place in the
modern world. They want to enjoy the benefits of modernity, but they care
rather a lot that their culture not die out. Moreover, I do not contemplate
with equanimity the death of the great world religions, or, for that matter, of
secular humanism. Of course, the great religious traditions have changed
over time and will continue to do so, becoming, one must hope, more open
to variant interpretations and more tolerant of each other. Secularism, too,
one trusts, will become less dogmatic as it becomes less threatened by reli-
gious traditions that will have become less fanatical.
Near the end of the essay, Rorty offers a more modest and thus more
plausible answer to the problem of the place of traditional cultures in a
world dominated by science and technology. He suggests that novels and
autobiographies by individuals who have negotiated conflicts between cul-
tures in their own lives may indicate “concrete, nontheoretical ways of
blending the modern West with one or another non-Western culture” This
40. Rorty, Truth and Progress, 194–195.

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seems to me eminently sensible.41 It suggests how members of quite differ-

ent communities can cooperate in forming a larger moral community, thus
coming closer to realizing Rorty’s hope for “a planet on which all members
of the species are concerned about the fate of all the other members.”42
“Feminism and Pragmatism” is of particular interest because both in the

main text, and even more so in the lengthy footnotes, Rorty tries to clarify
his views.43 A closer look at this paper will provide the opportunity to return
to various points I have left hanging.
It comes as no surprise that Rorty characterizes feminism’s contribution
to moral progress not as “an increasing ability to see the reality behind the
illusions created by superstition, prejudice, and unreflective custom,” but
merely as a stage in an evolutionary struggle that has no teleology.44 At pres-
ent we reject the enslavement of human females by human males in favor of
“the greater good that feminism is presently making imaginable.”45 But to
say that it is a greater good is, according to Rorty, an ethnocentric claim with
nothing to back it up.
Before I turn to the claims Rorty makes specifically about feminism and,
by implication, about any other extension of the moral community to peo-
ple previously regarded as not fully human, I need to demur from the
Darwinist picture presented here. This picture differs from the one I earlier
endorsed by extending the idea of evolution, of survival of the fittest, to
cultural evolution. The role played by genes is now ascribed to memes, cul-
tural items such as terms of moral praise, political slogans, musical phrases,
etc. Like genes they compete for (in this case, cultural) space. “No gene or
meme is closer to the purpose of evolution or to the nature of humanity than
any other—for evolution has no purpose and humanity no nature.”46 But,
41. Ibid., 200

42. Rorty, Contingency, 12.
43. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” in Truth and Progress, 202–227.
44. Ibid., 205.
45. Ibid., 207.
46. Ibid., 206–207.

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unlike nature, human beings have purposes; human beings singly and in
groups make a difference to the course of cultural development. Because,
once again, Rorty can see only two alternatives: either feminists and other
social critics appeal from current (bad) social practices to “something that
transcends social practice” or they are “doing the same sort of thing as the
early Christians, the early socialists, the Albigensians, and the Nazis”; they
are “trying to actualize hitherto-undreamt-of possibilities” by introducing
new practices.47
Of course, one cringes at the very thought that one may have to regard
the Nazis as doing the same thing as various kinds of utopians, for the point
of “early” in “early Christians” and “early socialists” is to remind the reader
of Christians before they had a theology that taught them to burn heretics
and of socialists before they had an ideology that invited them to execute
dissidents. These people were indeed trying to actualize societies that were
good not only from their point of view, practices that could be justified even
to many who were not prepared to share those utopias, ideals that seem good
even to us who know what happened later to those dreams. Rorty knows
that the Nazis do not belong in this list; why does he not ask himself what is
wrong with a philosophical picture that does not allow him to distinguish
between them and, say, the early Christians?
The alternative to Human Nature dictating the course of cultural evolution
is not “chance variation” in memes but deliberately introduced variations.
How we are to see what people do when they do that is the main subject of
“Feminism and Pragmatism.” Its core thesis is that “a pragmatist feminist will
see herself as helping to create women rather than as describing them more
accurately”—that is, as replacing our present social constructs by better ones.48
It has been objected that if feminism “makes” women, then no wrong was
done to human females in prior ages when they were treated as less than fully
human. That is, if there is nothing beyond the standards of a given commu-
nity to which social critics can appeal, then how is progress possible? We can,
to be sure, go a certain way in making the practices of our community more
coherent; we can, perhaps, go further by learning from other communities.
Ultimately only imagination, including imaginative experimentation, will
47. Ibid., 208.

48. Ibid., 212.

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do. But—this is what motivates Rorty’s attacks on moral realisms from Plato
to Marx—at the end of the twentieth century we should be wary of imagin-
ing large, timeless utopias; we should engage in “small experimental ways of
relieving human misery and overcoming injustice.”49
While I agree that we do not find our values, we make them, I want to
resist saying that feminists have “made” women. It seems to me simply con-
fusing to say both that “there were very few female full persons around be-
fore feminism got started” and to say also that “it was, of course, true in
earlier times that women should not have been oppressed.”50 Rorty explains
in a footnote, “All that pragmatists need is the claim that this sentence is not
made true by something other than the beliefs we would use to support it—
and, in particular, not by something like the Nature of Human Beings.”51
But what can it possibly mean to say that it was always wrong to oppress
women but to deny that women were always the sort of being (fully human)
that it is wrong to oppress? When we say that a purported law of physics, if
true, is always true, we are saying that the laws of physics are causally inde-
pendent of what we believe them to be; we are not saying that the Greeks
should have or could have discovered these laws given the state of their sci-
ence. In contrast, when we say that it was always wrong to treat women as
less than fully mature human beings, we are saying that even five thousand
years ago, it would have been possible to imagine and to live by social rules
that would have recognized women as fully equal to men. But what it was
possible to imagine and do is not causally independent of what people be-
lieve. It is a conceptual truth that a law of physics, if true, is always true; it is
NOT a conceptual truth, hence it must be argued case by case, that a moral
principle, if true, is always true.52 This is why ethnocentrism is interesting
with respect to morality but not with respect to science.
49. Ibid., 231.

50. Ibid., 225.
51. Ibid., 225–226n42.
52. Rorty fails to give such an argument for the principle that it was always wrong
for men to enslave women. Since the argument cannot appeal to conceptual truths, it
will have to appeal to historical facts concerning a wide variety of societies. Such an
empirical argument may not appeal to feminists who are moral realists, but as a prag-
matist Rorty must realize that arguments appealing to facts (and other values) are all
he can ever have for any moral judgment.

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Rorty addressed the question of ethnocentrism precisely with respect to

the liberal ideal of the dignity of all human beings in “Postmodern
Bourgeois Liberalism.”53 There he pointed out that we can defend this
ideal only by beginning where we are, from within our own tradition.
“The view that every tradition is as rational or as moral as every other,” he
wrote, “could be held only by a god, someone who had no need to use (but
only to mention) the terms ‘rational’ or ‘moral,’ because she had no need
to inquire or deliberate.”54 From within our own tradition, it is simply not
the case that all traditions are equally good. But this raises a problem pre-
cisely for liberals. For “we [bourgeois liberals] would rather die than be
ethnocentric, but ethnocentrism is precisely the conviction that we would
rather die than share certain beliefs.”55 In other words, how can liberals
avoid being committed to tolerating traditions that they do not find
good—in particular, the intolerant?
I believe this is one of the most serious political problems that democra-
cies face today. But acknowledging this practical problem does not help us
deal with the theoretical paradox that it seems to be ethnocentric to abhor
ethnocentrism. Rorty suggests that liberals should stop wondering whether
their belief in human equality is merely a cultural bias; instead, they should
say (proudly?), “So what? We Western Liberals do believe in it, and so much
the better for us.”56 But one should NOT say this; one should say, “I believe
in human equality, and I am glad that others do too.” “We Western Liberals”
sounds not like the modest acknowledgment that one stands inevitably
within a tradition but rather like the claim that one’s own tradition is the
only egalitarian tradition and, therefore, the best. This impression is rein-
forced when Rorty suggests that contact with other cultures is interesting
only in so far as “intercourse with these people may help modify our Western
ideas about what institutions can best embody the spirit of Western social
democracy”; but we will adopt their suggestions only after “we have man-
aged to fit them in with our distinctively Western social democratic aspira-
53. Rorty, “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism,” in Objectivity, 197–202.

54. Ibid., 202.
55. Ibid., 203.
56. Ibid., 207.

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tions, through some judicious give-and-take.”57 This strikes me as arrogant

and not in the fallibilistic spirit of pragmatism. The great world religions—
traditions that have proved far more resilient than Western liberalism—all
originated in Asia; who is to say from which continent an idea may emerge
that will move us closer to Rorty’s cosmopolitan utopia? In any case, I pre-
dict that its unifying values will be the result of what Rawls calls “an overlap-
ping consensus” rather than of the progressive Westernization of the rest of
the world’s traditions.58
These remarks were directed against views Rorty expressed in the 1980s; I
believe that his current position is not open to these objections. In “The End
of Leninism” he asks searching questions of “we leftist intellectuals”—that is,
of the people he used to call “we Western bourgeois liberals,” but the con-
cerns expressed are no longer limited to the rich North Atlantic democra-
cies.59 He asks, for example, “Are we more interested in alleviating misery or
in creating a world fit for Socrates, and thus for ourselves?”60 He writes now
of fantasies—hopes for a future in which everyone will earn a decent living
and be safe from violence and humiliation—shared by the educated and the
uneducated, by the professors in North American universities and “by the
people living in shantytowns outside Lima.”61 And here he might as well
have spoken of intellectuals in Lagos or of the poor in Dakar. Recognizing
one’s historicity (i.e., one’s ethnocentricity) he now holds “would mean
sticking to small experimental ways of relieving misery and overcoming in-
justice.”62 I have mentioned this advice before. It is worth repeating, for it is
both a lesson painfully learned by humanity and the practical aim of Rorty’s
struggle against moral realisms of all kinds, including Marxism.
The collapse of the paradigmatic Leninist state has forced the left to re-
think its position and aims and to revise its political vocabulary. “We can no
longer tolerate the ambiguity between capitalism as a way of financing in-
dustrial production and capitalism as the Great Bad Thing that accounts for
57. Ibid., 212.

58. John Rawls, “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” in Political Liberalism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 133–172.
59. Rorty, “The End of Leninism,” in Truth and Progress, 228–243.
60. Ibid., 231.
61. Ibid., 232.
62. Ibid., 231.

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most contemporary human misery. . . . Nor can we use the term ‘working
class’ to mean both ‘those who are given the least money and least security in
market economies’ and ‘the people who embody the true nature of human
beings.’”63 For while Rorty is “terrified” by the prevalence of the thought
that “free markets solve all social problems,” he does not know what the
better arrangements—he often calls them social democratic—will look like.
Meanwhile we can and should speak of the causes of human misery only in
such commonplace terms as “greed” or “hatred.”
Greed and hatred are indeed twin sources of human suffering. Hatred
leading to sadism and greed to (economic) injustice. The old reformist left
concentrated its efforts on alleviating the latter; the postmodern cultural left
concentrates on the former, prompting Rorty to write in anguish and out-
rage that “there is a dark side to the success story I have been telling about
the post-Sixties cultural Left. During the same period in which socially ac-
cepted sadism has steadily diminished, economic inequality and economic
insecurity has steady increased.”64
In his recent writings, Rorty exhorts us to act but he warns that we must
do so without a grand theory to sustain us. Whence then will come our in-
spiration? Rorty replies that we must reject the academic left’s disdain for
America, that we must once again be proud of our country. We can do that
in the face of overwhelming evidence of greed, sloth, and lack of principles
only by giving up the spectator’s point of view and becoming agents in-
volved in realizing Whitman’s and Dewey’s and Rorty’s and, yes, my “dreams
of an ideally decent and civilized society.”65
In conclusion, I want to return to a point raised earlier—namely, Rorty’s

claim that we have nothing to back us up when we say that the world femi-
63. Ibid., 233–234.

64. Rorty, Achieving, 83.
65. Ibid., 106. “A decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people.
. . . A civilized society is one whose members do not humiliate one another.” Avishai
Margalit, The Decent Society, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

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nists envisage is better than one in which women are subordinate to men, or
when we insist on people’s right to a living wage, or when we demand the
abolition of the death penalty, etc. I do not believe that we have nothing to
back us up, and I believe that Rorty is driven to this unpragmatic conclusion
because of a pattern of argument that occurs repeatedly in his writings. The
pattern is this:
1. In order for there to be x there must be y.

2. There are no y.
3. Therefore, there is no x.
Thus, he concluded from the premise that more widespread respect for hu-
man rights was not due to increased moral knowledge of the sort envisaged
by Plato, that it was not due to any increase in moral knowledge (nor, in-
deed, any other kind of knowledge). Or he argued that since human rights
are not based on a transcendent something in us, they have nothing to back
them up. In each case, and there are others I have not cited, pragmatists
should reject the premise. I want to conclude by spelling out in very broad
outlines what Rorty should have said.
Rorty tells us to substitute hope for knowledge. Of course, he does not
mean empirical knowledge, knowledge of specific human rights violations,
for example, or of the millions of Americans that have no health insurance;
indeed, he himself provides that information. He denies that we have moral
knowledge because he assumes that if there were moral knowledge it would
be of a nonempirical reality, the sort of knowledge that Plato or, in a differ-
ent way, Kant thought we could have. Of course, pragmatists deny that we
have that sort of knowledge. Moreover, it is a good thing that we do not have
that kind of knowledge; it is better for us that we do not take ourselves to
have that sort of knowledge. First, because arguments between people who
claim to have opposing intuitions are fruitless since there is no court of ap-
peal. Second, because if moral knowledge is seen as of eternal verities, it is
seen as incorrigible; so understood, it easily gives rise to dogmatism and fa-
naticism.
But pragmatists have another conception of moral knowledge because, as
discussed above, they have a different conception of knowledge. In fact,
pragmatists believe that the distinction between moral knowledge and the
rest of knowledge is a very superficial distinction, marking end points on a

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continuum. Descriptions of facts, value judgments (moral, cognitive, aes-

thetic, etc.), and theories (scientific, economic, literary, philosophical, etc.)
are deeply and inextricably interwoven. These views have been defended by
pragmatists since the days of James and Dewey and are being defended to
this day. Rorty himself wrote, “The pragmatists’ justification of toleration,
free inquiry, and the quest for undistorted communication can only take the
form of a comparison between societies which exemplify these habits and
those which do not, leading up to the suggestion that no one who has expe-
rienced both would prefer the latter.”66
“No one who has experienced both.” Well, no one has experienced the
utopias that guide our conduct if we share Rorty’s hopes, but we have expe-
rienced the results of “the small and experimental ways of relieving misery
and overcoming injustice” that we are taking, as well as, alas, the results of
failing to take those steps or moving backward. So we learn. Sometimes we
need to change our ways, sometimes we even need to change our dreams,
but sometimes we are entitled to say that we are making moral progress.
66. Rorty, Objectivity, 25.

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7
Reflections on the Future

of Pragmatism
Ruth Anna Putnam
JAMES SAID that pragmatism is a new name for some old ways of thinking.
Taking pragmatism as a way of thinking, an attitude toward one’s self, to-
ward the physical and social world in which one happens to live, and to-
ward, or at any rate in, philosophy, I maintain that pragmatism has sur-
vived—though often not under that name and perhaps audaciously that it
will survive, though perhaps, again, not under that name. In any case, I am
no more audacious than James himself, who on 2 January 1907, wrote to his
friend Theodore Flournoy:
I want to make you all enthusiastic converts to “Pragmatism” (—some-

thing not necessarily connected at all with “radical empiricism”) on which
I gave 8 Lowell lectures to a fine audience in Boston this winter (these are
the lectures which I shall repeat in N.Y.). I didn’t know, until I came to
prepare them, how full of power to found a “school” and to become a
“cause,” the pragmatistic idea was. But now I am all aflame with it, as
displacing all rationalistic systems—all systems in fact with rationalistic
elements in them—and I mean to turn the lectures into a solid little cube
of a book which I hope to send you by next October, and which will, I am
confident, make the pragmatic method appear, to you also, as the philos-

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R E F L EC T IONS ON T H E F U T U R E OF PR AGM AT ISM 109
ophy of the future. Every sane and sound tendency in life can be brought
in under it.1
While I do not believe that pragmatism is or should be a “school” or that it

is or will be a philosophy in the sense of a system, I do believe that the prag-
matic attitude is so fruitful, both in philosophy and in life, that it will con-
tinue to have its enthusiastic proponents.
Pragmatists, by which I mean those who have this attitude (or at least
some of its key features), take themselves to be agents in the world rather
than spectators; that is, experiencing is not a passive receiving of impressions
but an interacting of an organism with its environment. Sometimes acting
predominates on the side of the organism—the organism does something to
the physical or social environment; at other times, undergoing predomi-
nates—the organism is being done to by the environment; at yet other
times, there seems to be activity on both sides. Contrary to the older empir-
icists as well as twentieth-century analytic philosophers, pragmatists do not
restrict “experience” to sense experience; enjoying and suffering, feeling an-
gry or afraid, making an effort, and so on are also experiences. Moreover, as
James points out repeatedly, we experience relations. But this last detail does
not concern us here. In what follows I hope to make clear how the agent
point of view shows itself in various aspects of the pragmatic attitude, pre-
cisely in those aspects that are of enduring value.
Pragmatism as Public Philosophy
In what follows I shall draw attention particularly to features of the prag-

matic attitude emphasized by James. The very fact that Pragmatism was
given as lectures to large audiences, most members of which were not phi-
losophers, signifies, I believe, that pragmatism is more than an academic
philosophy. Thus, it is important to notice that both James and Dewey, and
1. William James, The Correspondence of William James, 12 vols., ed. Ignas K.

Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1992–
2004), 11:299.

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later Rorty and West were/are public philosophers addressing matters of

public concern in language and venues accessible to the public. Indeed,
Dewey wrote, “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for
dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, culti-
vated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.”2 I believe
Dewey meant, and in any case I mean, that philosophy needs to avoid a
scholastic self-absorption in self-generated problems. Taking the agent point
of view “evades” that sort of philosophizing; I borrow the term from Cornel
West.
Philosophy deals most immediately with the problems of human beings
when philosophers apply philosophical thinking to areas of human activity
other than philosophy itself. Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916) is an
early example. Indeed I see the influence of pragmatism in the proliferation
of philosophies (of some field or other) even when that influence is not ac-
knowledged. But I rejoice when I see explicit references to pragmatism, for
example in works by Elizabeth Anderson and Larry Hickman.
Pragmatism as Meliorism
When, in his first lecture, James read the anarchist Morrison L. Swift’s
descriptions of the horrors of abject poverty, it must have seemed to his
audience that James was crossing a border, the border between philosophy
and journalism, or perhaps between philosophy and sociology. Of course,
it would be absurd to claim that James in these lectures sought for a solu-
tion to the problem of poverty, or that he developed a philosophy of pov-
erty, or of journalism. He read these excerpts to make his audience vividly
aware of facts that created for him, and he believed for his audience, an
intellectual problem. He characterized the problem as a desire for a philos-
ophy that would “combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and
willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation and accom-
modation, in short, but also the old confidence in human values and the
resultant spontaneity whether of the religious or of the romantic type.”
And he responds, “I offer the oddly named thing Pragmatism as a philos-
2. Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” [1917], in Middle Works, 10:46.

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ophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like
the rationalisms. But at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve
the richest intimacy with facts.”3 The facts that were particularly relevant
were those concerning human poverty and other evils, and the religion
that James found intolerable was absolute idealism, or indeed any religion
that posited an all-knowing, all-powerful God and tried to deny the reality
of evil. The “solution” James finally offered in the last lecture was, he ad-
mitted, not required by pragmatism, but, he insisted, “My own Pragmatism
offers no objection.”4 He called this solution “meliorism.” It consists of
three propositions:
1. The world is not perfect, or evil is real.

2. The future is not determined; human beings cooperating can make
the world better.
3. A finite deity is their helper, primus inter pares, in this endeavor.
I shall, in what follows, consider propositions (1) and (2) to constitute

meliorism and the addition of (3) to give specifically theistic meliorism. A
finite deity is James’s solution, or rather evasion, of the problem of evil. Or
one might say that James replaced the intellectual problem of evil, the prob-
lem whether evil is “real” (a problem from the spectator’s point of view),
with the practical problem, the problem of how to alleviate evil (a problem
from the agent’s point of view). The second and third propositions are meta-
physical hypotheses; I shall say more about James’s attitude to them below.
Meliorism, with or without the third proposition, is a view that has never
been more desperately needed than today. James contrasted meliorism, char-
acterized as “the salvation of the world is possible,” with the two views that
the salvation of the world is either impossible or assured. I am not sure what
James meant by “salvation,” but we might plausibly mean halting global
warming before it destroys human life or civilization. We know that it will
take human effort, both on the individual and on the national and interna-
tional level, to achieve salvation in this sense. And, as James also pointed out,
individual effort needs to be motivated by a trust that others will make a like
effort.
3. James, Pragmatism, in Works, 1:17, 23.

4. Ibid., 142.

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I hasten to add that meliorism should not be understood only globally.

More limited problems also require cooperation based on a belief that things
can be improved and that others will also pitch in. Examples are easy to
come by. Again, as above, much more needs to be said, but that too is not
my task here. There is, for example, a vast literature on problems of coordi-
nation, on trust, and on free riders. This literature may serve as an example
of the point made above that public problems (“real world problems”) may
give rise to academic problems and benefit from the resulting academic in-
quiries. The cooperation that meliorism requires and assumes to be forth-
coming again calls for cross-disciplinary inquiries, whether on the model of
biomedical ethics or on that of philosophy of law. These fields that transgress
boundaries between traditional disciplines will, I believe, continue to flour-
ish because they provide two requisites for successful cooperation: an ex-
change not just of opinions but of viewpoints and a venue in which to make
explicit both shared and clashing values and to work on a resolution of value
conflicts—both points I shall return to below.
Pragmatism as a Method of Settling Metaphysical Disputes
According to James, pragmatism is a philosophy, it is a method of settling

metaphysical disputes, it is an attitude, and it is a theory of truth.5 I shall
ignore pragmatism as a theory of truth. And since pragmatism is not a phil-
osophical “system,” not a set of propositions, it is a philosophy precisely in
the sense of being an attitude, a way of life, in particular a way of dealing
with problems. We have seen how James dealt with the problem of evil, but
he said of his solution not that pragmatism required it but merely that his
pragmatism offered no objection. Yet he held that pragmatism is a method
of settling metaphysical disputes—namely, by using the pragmatic maxim
or, as he also called it, the principle of Peirce. I do not intend to discuss the
different formulations of the maxim provided by Peirce and James, nor the
different uses to which they meant to put the principle. I do not believe that
the pragmatic maxim, at least in James’s understanding of it, is one of those
features of pragmatism that have survived or will be revived. But James’s
5. Ibid., 23, 28, 31–33.

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initial formulation of the maxim is an example of the agent point of view

applied to metaphysical disagreements. James wrote, “To develop a thought’s
meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that
conduct is for us its sole significance.”6 If I were to criticize the maxim or
James’s version of it, I would have to quote what James added, but my pur-
pose here is not polemical. I merely wish to point out that James’s emphasis
on conduct follows naturally from the agent point of view. If then one asks,
concerning competing metaphysical hypotheses, what differences in con-
duct a belief in one and in the other would be likely to produce, then our
choice of one or the other will be a moral choice. James believed, for exam-
ple, that belief in a deterministic universe would lead to a debilitating pessi-
mism or to a subjectivism that would inevitably lead to “a nerveless senti-
mentality or a sensualism without bounds.”7 His moral revulsion leads him
to indeterminism and thus to the second proposition of meliorism.
Perhaps James is right; perhaps what seem to be metaphysical questions are,
at bottom, moral questions. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century
moral disagreements loom as large as, if not larger than, metaphysical disagree-
ments. Reducing metaphysical to moral disagreements does not seem to me a
promising strategy if our goal is agreement. Consider, for example, the ques-
tion whether a human fetus is a human being. It is quite clear what conduct is
permissible or prohibited if the answer is negative or positive. But since there
is no agreement on the moral question—indeed, the disagreement is heated
precisely because it is a moral disagreement—James’s method, James’s use of
the pragmatic maxim, is useless, although in his defense one might point out
that his question—what conduct is it fitted to produce?—has the merit of re-
vealing why the protagonists argue so passionately about the metaphysical
status of the fetus. Perhaps such clarity can be helpful.
Pragmatism as an Attitude
Leaving the maxim aside, leaving the very idea of settling metaphysical dis-
putes aside, let us take a look at James’s characterization of the pragmatic
6. Ibid., 29.
7. James, The Will to Believe, in Works, 6:132.

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attitude. “The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘catego-
ries,’ supposed necessities; and of looking toward last things, fruits, conse-
quences, facts.”8 Frankly, I find this quite vague. Surely, in every inquiry
some things (principles or supposed necessities) are taken for granted; surely,
we cannot think without thinking about kinds of things (categories); surely,
there is nothing wrong with an inquiry into causes (first things). What James
wants to say is that pragmatists are not dogmatic. What is taken for granted
in one inquiry may well be called into question in another. Pragmatists qua
pragmatists do not seek absolutely first things; they agree with biologists
who study the evolution of the species but do not take what they discover as
evidence for or against an intelligent designer. But, as we saw above, pragma-
tism does not bar religious inquiries; it merely asserts that they are not scien-
tific, a view shared by many scientists, both atheistic and theistic. The cate-
gories James rejects are neither the classifications of common sense nor those
of science; he questions Kantian categories and objects to rote thinking—for
example, racist or xenophobic thinking. The positive aspects of the pragma-
tist attitude mentioned by James are basically aspects of the attitude of any
scientist; I feel quite safe in saying that they are alive and well among scien-
tists and a large majority of the general population. It behooves us to ask
what it means for a philosopher to have the pragmatist attitude, for the
claim James and I make is that the attitude will prevail in philosophy. The
answer to that question is, I believe, found in the remark of Dewey’s quoted
above that philosophy must deal with the problems of human beings.
Philosophy must not be a refuge from our problems; it must help us to see
them clearly. If pragmatism does that, and if at times the problems seem
overwhelming, one may expect that at those times pragmatism might suffer
an eclipse. Others have suggested that the optimism that is an inseparable
part of meliorism, the faith in the possibility of progress, seems too facile at
such times. I am not quite convinced of either of these explanations. For
those of us who were graduate students in the fifties, the excitement that
various types of analytic philosophers brought to our campuses was irresist-
ible. I speak here autobiographically. One studied with Reichenbach and
Carnap and listened to lectures by Austin and by various students of
Wittgenstein. And yet, almost simultaneously, one was awakened (some

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more than others, some sooner, some later) from one’s analytic slumbers by
Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” And from some of our teachers we
learned something about pragmatism, seeds that lay dormant for a while and
then began to sprout.
I am not competent, nor would this be the place, to write the history of
the reawakening of pragmatism. My little autobiography is meant to ac-
knowledge the perspective from which I predict the resilience of pragmatism.
I am inclined to think that if one can claim that post-Holocaust depression
caused the eclipse of pragmatism, then one can also claim that the social fer-
ment of the civil rights movement and, a short while later, second-wave fem-
inism caused pragmatism’s revival. Because one hopes, with good reason, that
there will be social ferment for a long time to come; one hopes, with equal
reason, that the pragmatic attitude will stand in fruitful interaction with that
ferment.
Pragmatism as Pluralism
I have digressed. My task is to present features of the pragmatist temper of

mind that I believe will continue to stand us in good stead. Pragmatists hold
that human beings are social not only in the sense that, because we are slow
to mature, we need others to nurture us; not only in the sense that almost all
of us need human companions to keep our sanity; not only in the sense that
human knowledge is so vast and interrelated that each of us must rely on the
experience, inventiveness, and testimony of numerous others past and pres-
ent, but, pragmatists hold, in the sense that one’s very self and self-conception
are to a very significant extent the result of one’s social environment. For ex-
ample, whether one thinks of oneself as a philosopher and a mother or as a
mother who teaches philosophy depends in part on whether one is valued as
a philosopher or as a mother or as both by one’s peers; it depends in part on
the social status of philosophers and that of mothers in one’s community; and
it depends only partly on one’s own estimation of one’s abilities as a mother
and as a philosopher and one’s devotion to these roles.
Human beings are, in contemporary feminist language, “situated,” and,
in turn, what one comes to believe as the result of one’s experience is influ-
enced by one’s situation. A believing participant in a religious rite has an
experience that differs radically from that of an uninvolved spectator, and

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that differs from the experience of an anthropologist who knows what the
rite means to the believers. Thus, in this sense also, knowledge is (largely)
social, and so is morality. Indeed, morality too is social in more than one
sense: it deals with relations between humans; it is objective, according to
James, because humans care for each other; it is handed down to each of us
as customary morality, though we are able, Dewey emphasizes, by reflection,
to modify that morality. Here I merely want to point out that though we are
situated—we cannot help that—we are not condemned to relativism. We
can become conscious of what our situation is and that it colors our percep-
tions just as others’ different situations color theirs. If so, if we recognize the
inevitability of multiple perspectives, we are pluralists in one of the senses in
which James is a pluralist. He writes, in the preface to Talks to Teachers on
Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals,
According to [the pluralistic or individualistic] philosophy the truth is too

great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed “the
Absolute,” to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life need many
cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view absolutely public and
universal. Private and uncommunicable perceptions always remain over, and
the worst of it is that those who look for them from the outside never know
where.
And James continues,
The practical consequence of such a philosophy is the well-known democratic

respect for the sacredness of individuality—is, at any rate, the outward toler-
ance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they
sound now rather dead to our ears. Once they had a passionate inner mean-
ing. Such a passionate inner meaning they may acquire again if the preten-
sions of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vie et armis
upon Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has been
gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our ancient national
doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our
people now seem to imagine it to possess.9
9. James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology, in Works, 10:4–5.

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Because I believe that pluralism is one of pragmatism’s greatest contribu-

tions to philosophy—the other being its wide notion of experience—I want
to look at this quotation with some care. But first, and by the way, I need to
mention that James considered himself a pluralist in more than one sense. As
already mentioned, he rejected determinism, holding that a plurality of fu-
tures are open to us. He also held, as spelled out in detail in the chapter on
common sense, that each of us is able to understand what we experience in
at least three ways: the commonsense way of thinking, the scientific way, and
the philosophic way. In fact, I would say that there are more than three ways,
but it is doubtful that there is an unambiguous way of counting ways of
thinking (or vocabularies or conceptual systems).
In any case, the pluralism asserted in the preface to Talks to Teachers and
illustrated and elaborated in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”
and “What Makes a Life Significant” refers not to the plurality of general
perspectives open to each of us but to the plurality of points of view that we
severally occupy. This is a more radical “situatedness” than that emphasized
by some feminists, by Marxists, or by critical legal theorists and others who
point to social perspectives of dominance and oppression based on gender,
class, or race. It is no accident that James calls this aspect of his philosophy
“pluralistic or individualistic,” for he points to the plurality of individual
points of view. Concerning each of these he makes two points: (1) it is lim-
ited in that no one can take in the whole universe, or indeed very much of
even his or her near environment, and (2) it adds something to the picture,
and thus each person is worth listening to. And here it is important to note
that the picture includes both “the facts and worths” of life. If we then ask
what conduct pluralism is fitted to produce, it is, as James says, respect, or at
the very least tolerance, for the alien point of view. That means being willing
to hear what the other has to say, which, in turn, means creating institutions
that make it possible for the other to speak and to be heard. But it means
more than the institutions of a political democracy—universal suffrage, fre-
quent elections, and majority rule. It means more even than a commitment
to rights of individuals or to liberty, equality, and fraternity. It is, Dewey
said, a “way of life, social and individual,” and he elucidated: “The key note
of democracy as a way of life may be expressed, it seems to me, as the neces-
sity for the participation of every mature human being in formation of the
values that regulate the living of men together—which is necessary from the

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standpoint of both the general welfare and the full development of human
beings as individuals.”10
Recognizing that each human being has something worthwhile and
unique to contribute to the “formation of values” that regulate our living
together seems more important than ever. We can no longer confine our
attention to our compatriots or to our coreligionists. Our compatriots be-
long to many different faith communities or to none. Our coreligionists are
found in many nations. Pluralism, in the sense of respect for diverse views
and values, is desperately needed in the contemporary world. But what ex-
actly is involved in respecting the alien view? Must we succumb to a debili-
tating relativism? The agent point of view both requires a refutation of rela-
tivism and provides, I believe, the means for that refutation.
It must be pointed out, first, that the other’s “take” on things may simply
enrich ours, may increase our understanding and appreciation of the situa-
tion we share. Or the other may flatly contradict what we believe to be the
case, and then further investigation may be called for—this happens fre-
quently in science. At other times it may be clear to most of us that the other
is plainly mistaken—the earth just is not flat. And yet time and again in the
history of science what “only a mad man would believe” became accepted
scientific opinion. What is at stake in these kinds of cases is the pragmatist
commitment to fallibilism, and there is work here for philosophers, for that
notion is far from clear. Nothing much seems to hang on disputes between
those who accept the scientific consensus and those who do not, except
when the latter have the power of religion or of the state on their side. The
present dispute between teachers of biology who teach the theory of evolu-
tion and proponents of “intelligent design” who seek “equal time” raises this
issue once again and calls for a pluralist analysis. My own pragmatist “solu-
tion” is to point out that the theory of evolution is a scientific theory while
the hypothesis of intelligent design is a religious, that is, a philosophical
hypothesis. Hence the former belongs in science but not in philosophy
classes, and the latter in philosophy but not in science classes. I mentioned
earlier that multiple perspectives are available to each of us; students having
attended both classes need not be confused if they have also studied pragma-
10. Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration” [1937], in Later Works,

11:217–218.

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tism. They will understand that just as the good Bishop Berkeley did not eat
ideas for breakfast, so no scientific prediction or explanation follows from a
theological premise.
But James spoke not only of the facts but also of the “worths” of things,
and when values clash, matters become considerably more complicated.
While philosophers when they think about ethics tend to exaggerate the ease
with which scientific disagreements can be settled, one can hardly say that
they exaggerate the seriousness of moral disagreements and the difficulty of
resolving them. Pragmatists by emphasizing pluralism seem to be commit-
ted to moral relativism, in so far as morality is social, or to rank subjectivism
in so far as one’s morality is shaped by one’s own reflection. But this is not
so. Here again the agent point of view comes to the fore. We act to realize
our values (in pursuit of our goals, to honor our commitments, etc.), and we
evaluate the results of our actions. In ethics as in science, we learn from ex-
perience and we learn from other people’s experiences. The flourishing of
modern science was in large measure due to the democratization of scientific
inquiry. In ethics the democratization of inquiry presupposes the democra-
tization of the public, the establishment of venues and institutions that in-
clude those whose voices are rarely heard and even less taken account of. The
suggestion that those whose voices are weak should band together to shout
in unison comes easily to mind. Labor unions, the NAACP, the League of
Women Voters, the Sierra Club, and the like are cases in point, yet that list
itself is quite variegated. One must also remember—for James this was of
great importance—that the members of such organizations are individuals
who differ widely and importantly in other respects, and these differences
need also to be respected. There is need here for philosophical inquiry as well
as for political action. Pluralism and fallibilism can, I hope, protect us from
going down too many blind alleys. Here again everything substantial must
remain unsaid. I am suggesting that in a world of ever-increasing diversity in
even its smallest social units there is an ever-increasing need for the respect
and tolerance James advocated under the rubric of pluralism.
There is, then, much work for pluralist philosophers. They may articulate
the concerns of a group that needs to be heard, as feminist philosophers do.
They may address specific issues in political philosophy or the philosophy of
law. They may clarify the basic notions of pluralism: point of view or situa-
tion, respect and tolerance, the idea of putting oneself in another’s shoes,
and so on. Finally, pragmatist philosophers, precisely because they are plu-

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ralists, must transcend the boundaries of so-called schools of philosophy.

Thus, although the major present-day pragmatists were trained in one ver-
sion or another of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, they turned their
attention, sooner or later, not only to pragmatism but from within pragma-
tism to one or another strain of so-called continental philosophy. I shall only
mention Richard Rorty’s interest in Heidegger and Hilary Putnam’s interest
in Levinas.
I mention these tasks for pragmatists in the expectation that they will be
taken up. If so, we need not worry about the continuance of pragmatist
philosophizing; James’s faith and mine in the future of pragmatism will be
vindicated.

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8
Was James a Pragmatist?
Ruth Anna Putnam
OF COURSE , James was a pragmatist. But my question allows me to consider

James from a variety of perspectives. James would have been pleased with
that, since one of his important contributions to our thinking was precisely
that no single perspective can give us the whole truth about any subject. I
shall look at James’s pragmatism from four points of view: the historical, the
meaning and use of the pragmatic maxim, the theory of truth, and radical
empiricism.1
1. The Early History of Pragmatism
There is a way of telling the story of the beginnings of pragmatism that mini-
mizes James’s contribution. James himself tells the story that way in the lec-
tures he delivered in the winter of 1906–1907 and published as Pragmatism: A
New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. According to this familiar story,
James and C. S. Peirce belonged to a group of young men calling themselves
“The Metaphysical Club” who met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late
1870s. Lest their philosophical musings be lost, they commissioned Peirce to
write up a summary that he incorporated into his two famous articles, “The
1. For a consideration of religious experience see Chapter 16 (“William James on

Religion”) of this volume.

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124 KEY TOPICS IN THE PRAGMATISM OF JAMES AND DEWEY
Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” The latter contained
what became known as the principle of pragmatism, but the word “pragma-
tism” did not appear in print until twenty years later. In fact, so the story goes,
pragmatism was forgotten until it was revived (both the principle and the
word) by William James in 1898. It then caught on and acquired a multitude
of followers. In his 1906 lectures on the subject, James maintained that prag-
matism was not only a method for analyzing meanings but also a theory of
truth, a theory that, according to James, had been developed by John Dewey
and F. C. S. Schiller. This story suggests that James played a secondary though
no doubt practically important role in the development of pragmatism.
This suggestion is to be rejected. James was in every sense an equal co-
founder of pragmatism. I offer the following evidence for my claim. James
held and advocated what are distinctly pragmatist views as early as 1878.2 In
spite of the emphasis in Peirce’s reminiscences on the pragmatic principle
and in James’s lectures on that principle and on the pragmatic “theory of
truth,” pragmatism is characterized primarily by a certain attitude, a certain
way of philosophizing. While no one formulation can do justice to the dif-
ference between the pragmatic attitude and those to which it is opposed, one
important difference is that for most philosophers since Plato, and particu-
larly since Descartes, knowers are spectators of the reality they seek to know.
For pragmatists, in contrast, knowers are agents; they interact with the real-
ity they come to know. In his “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind”
James brilliantly contrasts the spectator’s point of view with his own agent
point of view:
I, for my part, cannot escape the consideration, forced upon me at every turn,
that the knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foot-hold anywhere,
and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply exist-
ing. The knower is an actor, and co-efficient of the truth on one side, whilst
on the other he registers the truth he helps to create.3
The point here is twofold. On the one hand, all learning from experi-
ence, whether it be that of a child or that of a scientist, involves manipu-
2. See James, “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence,” in

Essays in Philosophy, in Works, 5:7–22.
3. Ibid., 21.

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WA S JA M E S A PR AGM AT IST? 125
lation of the environment; in other words, in order to know the world we

must change it. Adherents of the spectator view tend to ignore this; their
paradigmatic knower is not a laboratory scientist. On the other hand,
what the opponents of pragmatism cannot ignore and what troubles them
greatly is the claim that the knower is “co-efficient of the truth.” In
Pragmatism James distinguished three ways or as he called them “stages”
of thinking: common sense, scientific thinking, and philosophical criti-
cism. Not only do these involve different sets of concepts but different
modes of inference and different standards of adequacy. In fact, I am in-
clined to say, there are at each Jamesean stage several alternative “ways of
thinking.”
James said about these stages of thinking that they are good for different
purposes but that one cannot say of any one of them that it is more true than
another one, let alone that it is absolutely true. I myself believe that it is
misleading to speak of ways of thinking, of perspective on the world, as true
or false. Beliefs belonging to one or another such way are true or false, and
there are criteria for their truth. In the early essay with which this discussion
began, James wrote, “The only objective criterion of reality is coerciveness,
in the long run, over thought.”4 This agrees with the conception of reality
presented by Peirce in the same year: “The opinion which is fated to be ulti-
mately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and
the object represented in this opinion is the real.”5 I conclude that pragma-
tism was indeed conceived and developed in the Metaphysical Club and
offered to an, at first not very appreciative, world by both Peirce and James
in the same year, 1878.
Nor did pragmatism fall into oblivion for the next twenty years. James’s
philosophizing in those years exemplifies the pragmatist attitude. It is, James
was to say in Pragmatism, an “attitude of looking away from first things,
principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last
things, fruits, consequences, facts.”6 In particular, James’s philosophizing
was animated by what I have called elsewhere a moral impulse, the desire,
namely, to find a philosophy—James would have called it a world formula—
that makes room for our moral lives. James saw pragmatism as the great
4. Ibid.
5. Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:405.

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mediator between the demands of empiricism and those of religion. He did

not think one had to believe in God in order to lead a moral life, but he
thought that such a belief was a precious source of moral energy. There was,
he also thought, a real behavioral difference between a believer in free will
and a determinist. The former would go in for the strenuous moral life; the
latter would either sink into pessimism or, worse, “a nerveless sentimentality
or a sensualism without bounds.”7
James argued passionately for our right to believe “in advance of the
evidence” when whether we did so or not would make a real difference in
our lives. James was interested primarily in believing the “theistic hypoth-
esis” and in real possibilities and free will—in short, in believing that our
choices and our efforts can contribute to the realization of our ideals be-
cause ours is a moral universe. These are matters we must take on trust,
and our taking them so will make a difference to how we live. I would like
to add here, first, that James does not speak of trust, but trust is clearly
what is at stake and, second, that our lives are shot through with occasions
when we must take things on trust. Our relations to other human beings
depend on trust; one devotes oneself to a scientific research project trust-
ing that one’s hunch will prove to be fruitful; one offers financial and other
support to political candidates trusting that they will be able to win and
that, once elected, they will live up to their words, etc. Because pragma-
tism is agent centered, pragmatists tend to notice these action-oriented
forms of belief.
Though James did not use the word “pragmatism” in the essays just men-
tioned, I suspect that they paved the way for pragmatism’s later acceptance
under its own name. Having said this, I must, however, add that neither
Peirce nor Dewey were entirely happy with the style of argument James
presented in The Will to Believe and in those chapters of Pragmatism in which
he applied the pragmatic principle to metaphysical and religious questions.
Peirce responded by adopting for his “narrow” version of pragmatism the
label “pragmaticism.” Dewey was troubled by James’s rather too free use of
the word “true.”8

8. See Dewey, “Review of James’s Pragmatism, ‘What Pragmatism Means by
Practical,’” in Middle Works, 4:98–115.

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2. The Principle of Pragmatism
What exactly is that principle? According to Peirce, it is hardly more than a

corollary of Bain’s definition of belief as that which a person is prepared to act
upon.9 This is the agent point of view in a nutshell. Elaborating a little bit, we
may say that thinking is prompted by an interaction between a human being
and the world, an interaction that is surprising, that leaves the thinker in doubt
how to proceed. Thus Peirce was to say that thinking was prompted by doubt,
although he realized that “doubt” was often too strong a term to apply. Making
the same point, Dewey spoke of a problematic situation as prompting thought,
emphasizing the objective circumstances rather than the subjective feeling pro-
voked by them. In any case the thought process will come to a conclusion in
another interaction between the human being and the world, an interaction
that will produce some perceptible change in the world. Hence, Peirce con-
cludes the train of thought here sketched, “Consider what effects, that might
conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception
to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of
the object.”10 This is the original formulation of the Principle of Pragmatism.
I say “original formulation” because in the very lecture in which James
reintroduced the principle to the philosophical world, he announced that he
preferred the following broader formulation:
The ultimate test for us of what a truth means is indeed the conduct it dictates
or inspires. But it inspires that conduct because it first foretells some particu-
lar turn in our experience which shall call for just that conduct from us. And
I should prefer to express Peirce’s principle by saying that the effective mean-
ing of any philosophical proposition can always be brought down to some
particular consequence, in our practical experience, whether active or passive;
the point lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular, than
in the fact that it must be active.11
This reformulation with its emphasis on the particularity of the conse-

quences seems to mark a clear difference between James and Peirce. For

10. Ibid., 402.
11. James, Essays in Philosophy, in Works, 5:124.

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Peirce, in one of his restatements of pragmatism, rebukes an imagined inter-

locutor who identifies the rational meaning of a concept with an experi-
ment—that is, a particular event. Rational meaning, Peirce writes, consists
not in an experiment but in an experimental phenomenon, not, to use his
own words, in “any particular event that did happen to somebody in the
dead past, but what surely will happen to everybody in the living future who
shall fulfill certain conditions.”12
Christopher Hookway has formulated the difference in question suc-
cinctly as follows. Suppose that C is a proposition the meaning of which is
to be clarified by use of the pragmatic method. Consider the following three
questions:
1. What will I experience if C is true?

2. What should I do if C is true?
3. If C is true, what would I experience if I were to carry out action A?
According to Hookway, James will ask questions 1 and 2, while “for

Peirce, 3 is the crucial question.”13 James characterizes pragmatism as a doc-
trine which inter alia “agrees with nominalism.”14 Peirce insists strenuously
upon scholastic realism.15 Although James claims to be a nominalist, in 1879
he seems to have defended a kind of realism. He had pointed out that “a
truly wise man” would take two phenomena, say, seeing a white cloud on
one day and snow on another, each in its entirety. While sometimes the
differences in time and place, the peculiarity, matters, at other times the
identity in quality (whiteness) will be of interest. James concluded, “Realism
is eternal and invincible in this phenomenal sense.”16 Again, in the preface to
The Meaning of Truth, while explaining his doctrine of radical empiricism,
James wrote that “the parts of experience hold together from next to next by
relations that are themselves part of experience. The directly apprehended

13. Christopher Hookway, “Logical Principles and Philosophical Attitudes,” in The
Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge:
14. James, Pragmatism, in Works, 1: 32
15. Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:423. Both James and Peirce are commonsense (or
“direct” or “pragmatic”) realists.
16. James, Essays in Philosophy, in Works, 5: 51.

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universe needs, in short, no trans-empirical support, but possesses in its own

right a concatenated and continuous structure.”17 This is neither scholastic
realism nor scholastic nominalism. One may be tempted here to say that this
may be all the “realism” that Peirce needs, especially since an emphasis on
continuity is one of the outstanding characteristics of his world view. But to
say this ignores other features of that view—namely, precisely the point to
which Hookway draws attention. Peirce will ask, “If C is true, what would I
experience if I were to do A?” That is to say, what would anyone experience?
This kind of generality, expressed in generalized subjunctive conditionals, is
for Peirce a feature of Thirdness, of a reality that is not experienced in James’s
sense of “experience.”18 There is nothing in James’s ontology that corresponds
to Peircean Thirdness. In view of the claim, made by both Peirce and James,
that pragmatism solves (or dissolves) metaphysical disputes, it strikes me as
ironic that they are here at metaphysical loggerheads.
It is often said, and was indeed believed by Peirce, that there is a real differ-
ence between Peirce’s and James’s use of the principle of pragmatism. Peirce
says repeatedly that the principle is to be used to elucidate the “rational pur-
port” of hard or intellectual concepts; James uses the principle to elucidate the
meanings—the import and value in our lives—of certain metaphysical doc-
trines. A comparison of James’s “The Dilemma of Determinism” with Peirce’s
“The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” illustrates the difference clearly.19 Peirce
rebuts with great care all major arguments for determinism and defends with
equal care his own hypothesis of chance-spontaneity as an explanatory princi-
ple in science; James, as mentioned earlier, discusses with passion the dire moral
consequences of a belief in determinism. But let us consider another case.
In his paper “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” Peirce wrote,
“Any normal man who considers the three Universes in the light of the hy-
pothesis of God’s Reality, and pursues that reflection in scientific singleness of
heart, will come to be stirred to the depth of his nature by the beauty of the
idea and by its august practicality, even to the point of earnestly loving and
17. James, The Meaning of Truth, in Works, 2: 6–7.

18. I am indebted here to Hilary Putnam’s introduction to The Correspondence of
William James, vol. 10: 1902–March 1905, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M.
Berkeley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002).
19. James, The Will to Believe, in Works, 6:114–140; Peirce, Collected Papers, 6:36–65
(originally published in The Monist, 1892).

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adoring his strictly hypothetical God, and to that of desiring above all things
to shape the whole conduct of life and all springs of action in conformity with
that hypothesis. Now to be deliberately and thoroughly prepared to shape
one’s conduct into conformity with a proposition is neither more nor less
than the state of mind called Believing that proposition.”20 Peirce adds, in a
later part of the essay, that scientifically trained persons would wish to test the
hypothesis of God’s reality, and to do that would take their stand on pragmat-
icism, holding that its “ultimate test must lie in its value in the self-controlled
growth of man’s conduct of life.”21 This is as Jamesian an argument as one can
imagine. It is therefore of interest to note that in this very essay Peirce empha-
sizes his disagreements with James’s argument in “The Will to Believe,” an
essay that he seems to misunderstand. I conclude that the differences between
James and Peirce in connection with the uses of the principle of pragmatism
are more apparent than real.
3. The Theory of Truth
I mentioned above that in his early article “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition

of Mind,” James’s account of truth appears to be in agreement with that of
Peirce. Yet after the publication of Pragmatism James was castigated repeatedly
for the theory of truth that he proposed in that work and ascribed to Ferdinand
C. S. Schiller and John Dewey. Incidentally, Dewey in his review of Pragmatism
was careful to distinguish his views on truth from those James ascribed to
him.22 Just what was the account of truth James proposed in Pragmatism?
20. Peirce, Collected Papers, 6:467. The “three universes,” in the article in question,
are characterized as that of mere ideas, that of brute actuality, and that of anything
capable of establishing connections between things. He gives as examples of these
thirds: signs, a living consciousness, a living constitution, a great fortune, etc.
21. Ibid., 480.
22. Dewey wrote, “Since Mr. James has referred to me as saying ‘truth is what gives
satisfaction’ (p. 234), I may remark (apart from the fact that I do not think that I ever
said that truth is what gives satisfaction) that I have never identified any satisfaction
with the truth of an idea, save that satisfaction which arises when the idea as working
hypothesis or tentative method is applied to prior existences in such way as to fulfill
what it intends.” Dewey, “Review,” 109.

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Precisely because pragmatists take the agent point of view, they under-
score the importance of true beliefs. James writes, “We live in a world of
realities that can be infinitely useful or infinitely harmful. Ideas that tell us
which of them to expect count as the true ideas in all this primary sphere of
verification, and the pursuit of such ideas is a primary human duty.”23
By general agreement an idea or a belief is true if it is in agreement with
reality. But just what does that mean? To be sure, sometimes we have a
mental image that corresponds exactly to a sense perception. But this will
not do even for so simple an idea as that of a clock, a particular clock now
before us. For when we say that it is a clock, we are saying that it has
works, that it tells time more or less accurately, etc. These are not things of
which we have mental “copies.”24 Let us, then, use the pragmatic method
to clarify our idea of truth. When Peirce did that, he began by noting that
scientists are “animated by the cheerful hope that the process of investiga-
tion, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain [he means “unique”]
answer to each question to which they apply it.” He concludes, “This great
hope is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion
which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we
mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.”25
This is virtually the view James advocated in “Remarks on Spencer’s
Definition of Mind.” Here I want to emphasize that James never rejected
this notion of truth, which I shall call absolute truth. It was also affirmed
by Dewey.26 For both James and Dewey it served as a regulative ideal. Thus
James wrote,
The ‘absolutely’ true, meaning what no further experience will ever alter, is
that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary
truths will some day converge. It runs on all fours with the perfectly wise
man, and with the absolutely complete experience; and if these ideas are ever
realized, they will all be realized together.27
23. James, Pragmatism, in Works 1:98.

24. Ibid., 96.
26. See Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in Later Works, 12:345n6.
27. James, Pragmatism, in Works 1:106–107.

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But he concludes, “Meanwhile, we have to live to-day by what truth we

can get today, and be ready to call it tomorrow falsehood.” In other words,
James is a fallibilist, but not a skeptic. We must be prepared to find that our
expectations are frustrated, but that is no reason to suspend all belief, or to
refuse to use the term “true.” Indeed, James appears to be more interested in
the notion of truth that we apply in ordinary life and in science to (some of )
our present beliefs. Occasionally he refers to such beliefs as half-true. Let us
see, then, what James has to say about “truth” in this low-brow and provi-
sional sense.
As did Peirce, so James looks at the actual behavior of scientists, to see
how the notion of truth works in practice. The behavior that interests him
the most is that by which new facts are grafted onto our existing body of
knowledge. When first broaching the question of truth, he reminds his au-
dience that contemporary scientists realize “that no theory is absolutely a
transcript of reality, but that any one of them may from some point of view
be useful. Their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones.”28
Dewey and Schiller, he continues, simply generalize this to all contexts. They
hold, he claims,
that ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just so
far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience
. . . [and] any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our
experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely,
simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true
instrumentally. This is the ‘instrumental’ view of truth taught so successfully
in Chicago.29
If an idea “carries us prosperously” from one experience to another, we

may say that to that extent the idea has become verified or corroborated.
Thus, to use James’s simple example of the clock on the wall: If we use it to
determine when we must leave to keep an important appointment, and if we
find ourselves indeed on time, we conclude that our hypothesis (or idea, or
belief ) that this object is a clock in good working order is true. However,
unlike James, one normally does not say that it has “become true”; we will
28. Ibid., 33.

29. Ibid., 33–34.

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say, rather, that it has become verified or warranted. I am not saying that
James confuses truth and verification; as Hilary Putnam has pointed out,
James explicitly denies doing so.30
Interestingly, James does not say of beliefs that become falsified that they
have “become false”; on the contrary he holds that they have always been
false. Speaking of now-rejected scientific theories—for example, Ptolemaic
astronomy—he writes that “we now call these things only relatively true, or
true within those borders of experience. ‘Absolutely’ they are false, for we
know those limits were casual, and might have been transcended by past
theorists just as they are by present thinkers.”31 Here again, while agreeing
with James’s thoughts, one may prefer different words. Although one would
not call Ptolemaic astronomy “relatively true,” one may well say that it was,
at that time, warranted. But James and we agree that it is false, timelessly
false, while the status of being warranted, or verified, or “relatively true” is
evidently time dependent.
So far so good, but the enemies of pragmatism will demur when James
concludes, “Like the half-truths, the absolute truth will have to be made.”32
Here, I believe, we come close to the root of the disagreement. For what is at
stake here is not simply language that distinguishes carefully between truth
and verification. What is at stake is James’s insistence, already mentioned,
that “the knower is an actor, and co-efficient of the truth on one side, whilst
on the other he registers the truth he helps to create.”33
How, then, does the knower help to create the truth? Consider here the
case of genuinely new experiences—that is, experiences of new facts. How do
these become incorporated into the body of our beliefs? In James’s day the
discovery of radium, of a substance that seemed to violate the familiar law of
the conservation of energy, was such a new fact. It could not be simply added
onto the established body of beliefs on pain of inconsistency. A new theory
was called for, but any such theory had to meet several desiderata. One wants
to hold on to as much of one’s old beliefs as possible, one wants to end up
with a consistent set of beliefs, but one also wants to acknowledge the new
30. See Chapter 11 (“James’s Theory of Truth,” HP) of this volume. He refers to
James, The Meaning of Truth, in Works, 2:108–109.
32. Ibid.
33. See note 3.

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fact. James is insistent: “Between the coercions of the sensible order [Humean
matters of fact including causal laws] and those of the ideal order [Humean
relations of ideas], our mind is thus wedged tightly. Our ideas must agree
with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they
principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.” And im-
mediately thereafter, James insists specifically that our new ideas must take
account of “the whole body of truths already in our possession.”34
It is difficult to see where James leaves room for the subjective factor, or
why his account of truth would meet with such hostility. It will help, I hope,
to distinguish several matters.
First, there is the fact that from time to time, especially during revolution-
ary periods, alternative scientific accounts, using alternative conceptual sys-
tems, will be proposed to assimilate new facts. At such times different scientists
will be attracted to different hypotheses and devote themselves to their verifi-
cations. James has a tendency to overemphasize this subjective element, as
when he says, “When old truth grows, then, by new truth’s addition, it does so
for subjective reasons.”35 For the play of subjectivity is severely limited by the
shared stock of old beliefs, and in the long run, the objective factors, the sense
perceptions, may overwhelm the subjective attractions. In any case, the dom-
inant subjective reason for the growth of new truth is the desire to make sense
of new facts. Surely, no one will object to that.
Second, James believes that there is more than one conceptual system—
recall the “stages” mentioned earlier—by means of which we classify, order,
and understand our experiences. We have already seen that for James, and
here he differs from Peirce, there is no privileged conceptual system that
corresponds uniquely to reality. James is not a scholastic realist. He is, how-
ever, a commonsense realist. He distinguishes between facts and what we say
or believe about them. “Truths emerge from facts,” James writes, “but they
dip forward into facts again [because they cause us to act] and add to them;
which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so
on indefinitely. The ‘facts’ themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply
are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among
them.”36
34. James, Pragmatism, in Works, 1:101, 102.

35. Ibid., 36.
36. Ibid., 108.

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Surely, this should be as objective a notion of truth as any reasonable

person could want. But, unfortunately, James chose to summarize his ac-
count of truth, that is, of provisional or half-truth, with emphasis on these
all-too-familiar words.
‘The true,’ to put it briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as
‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.
To be sure, he continues,
Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the
whole of course; for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won’t
necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we
know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.37
Unfortunately, many of James’s readers, even quite distinguished ones,

ignored everything except the emphasized remark about the true being the
expedient in our way of thinking, ignoring even the qualifications “in the
long run and on the whole.” They inverted the perfectly correct claim that
true beliefs are useful because they are true into the falsehood that useful
beliefs are true because they are useful. Their misreading was perhaps en-
couraged by James’s approach to metaphysical and religious questions both
in the essays collected in the volume The Will to Believe and in Pragmatism.
For, as James wrote in the preface to The Meaning of Truth, defending against
these misunderstandings, “One of the accusations which I oftenest have had
to meet is that of making the truth of our religious beliefs consist in their
‘feeling good’ to us, and nothing else.”38 One basis for this charge was that
he had said, in Pragmatism, that the belief of some philosophers in the
Absolute was “true in so far forth” as it gave one permission to take moral
holidays. Of course, James made it quite clear that he rejected the belief in
the Absolute because it clashed with other more vital beliefs of his, and in
The Meaning of Truth he acknowledged that this use of the word “true” was
misguided and he withdrew it.
But it was not just his casual use of the word “true” that troubled the critics.
37. Ibid., 106 (emphasis in original).

38. James, The Meaning of Truth, in Works, 2:5.

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It seemed even to so sympathetic a critic as John Dewey that James failed to

distinguish clearly between various problems. At times he holds that what
makes the consequences of an idea satisfactory, and thus contributes to “mak-
ing it true,” is indeed that they are as predicted. At other times James seems to
say what “makes it true” is that the consequences for oneself of one’s having the
idea should be in some sense satisfying. The remark about the Absolute being
“so far forth true” is the most egregious example of this. James emphasizes
satisfaction in the former sense when he speaks of scientific hypotheses and in
the latter when he speaks of metaphysical, in particular of theistic, hypotheses.
Dewey maintains that James’s “real doctrine is that a belief is true when it
satisfies both personal needs and the requirements of objective things.”39 He
adds mildly, “I do not think, in logical strictness, that satisfying one of two
tests, when satisfaction of both is required, can be said to constitute a belief
true even ‘in so far forth.’”40 I believe James would have agreed. In any case,
this is not the time to defend or dispute James’s theory of truth. One tends to
make James out to be too much of a realist if one tries to defend him and too
much of a subjectivist if one wants to attack him. I myself believe that James
leaves philosophers with two tasks: to carefully distinguish fallibilism from
skepticism and to carefully distinguish acknowledging the role of the subjec-
tive factor from relativism.
4. Radical Empiricism
James was a radical empiricist. He called himself a radical empiricist in the

preface to The Will to Believe: an ‘empiricist’ because he regarded any beliefs
concerning matters of fact as hypotheses subject to possible modification in
the light of subsequent experience; ‘radical’ because he rejected the dogmatic
monism then prevailing in favor of pluralism. As I said at the outset, there is
no single point of view from which anyone (even a God) can apprehend the
whole of reality. So far, there seems to be no difference between radical em-
piricism and pragmatism.41 But in the preface to Pragmatism James wrote
39. Dewey, “Review,” 112.

40. Ibid.
41. See also the preface to Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of
Life’s Ideals, in Works, vol. 10.

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that “there is no logical connexion between Pragmatism, as I understand it,

and a doctrine which I have recently set forth as ‘radical empiricism.’ The
latter stands on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and still be a
Pragmatist.”42 Apparently, however, one could not reject pragmatism and
still be a radical empiricist, for in the preface to The Meaning of Truth James
wrote that “the establishment of the Pragmatist theory of truth is a step of
first rate importance in making radical empiricism prevail.”43 What is radical
empiricism as understood in these two remarks?
According to John J. McDermott, radical empiricism in the later sense is
continuous with the earlier notion.44 It is James’s attempt, as he wrote to his
friend François Pillon, to “defend a pluralistic empiricism radically.”45
Radical empiricism is James’s escape from the solipsism implicit in the spec-
tator view. Indeed, one of his essays is called “How Two Minds Can Know
One Thing.”46 Why is that a problem? There are as many ways to state the
problem as there are versions of the spectator view. But in one form or an-
other, the spectator view inserts an interface, let us call it a ‘sense datum’,
between the observer and the thing observed, say, a pen. You know your
sense data and I know my sense data, but only in a Pickwickian sense can we
be said to know the pen, and in that sense you don’t know the same pen that
I know. On one such view, the pen you know is a logical construction out of
your sense data, while the pen I know is a logical construction out of my
sense data. And, of course, matters are even worse, if that’s possible, if you
and I merely think of the same object. Yet if I ask you to bring me the pen
that lies on my desk, you have no trouble doing so.
James takes our common experience seriously and explains it as follows.
Consider first the event of my seeing the pen—it is an event in the history
of the physical pen; it is also an event in the history of my mental life. In so
far as the event is causally linked to, say, the pen holding ink, being moved
by my hand, marking paper, it is, James says, a physical pen. In so far as a
slightly later event in my mental history is an awareness—a retrospecting—
42. James, Pragmatism, in Works 1:6.

43. James, The Meaning of Truth, in Works 2:6.
44. See the Introduction to John J. McDermott, ed. The Writings of William James
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
45. Quoted in William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, in Works, 3:xxvii.
46. Ibid., 61–67.

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of seeing the pen, it is a percept. Taken out of both contexts it is neither

mental nor physical; it is what James calls a “pure experience.” The crucial
point here is that there is no interface between me and the pen—the pen
itself is part of the content of my experience. And nothing prevents the pen
from being also part of the content of your experience. The pen I see in your
hand is the pen that you feel and see.
Matters are more complicated when you and I merely think of the same
thing, and I am not saying that James’s account works, or that one must
accept the ontology of pure experience. But when you and I meet, as we had
agreed, in front of Notre Dame in Paris, that edifice is what we both “had in
mind.”47 I am interested in how James’s radical empiricism relates to his
pragmatism, in particular to his theory of truth. James provides a succinct
summary of radical empiricism in the preface to The Meaning of Truth. I
shall quote it at length:
Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate, next of a statement of fact,

and finally of a generalized conclusion.
The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philos-
ophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. . . .
The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive as
well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience,
neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves.
The generalized conclusion [that I quoted above, but shall repeat here] is
that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by rela-
tions that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended uni-
verse needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but
possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.48
47. Hilary Putnam points out that in his famous essay “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?”
James rejects an interface conception of conception as well as of perception, but that in
Pragmatism and in The Meaning of Truth he returned to an interface conception of
conception; that is, successful reference to public objects is taken to stand in need of
analysis. Putnam considers this to be a mistake. Dewey points out in his review of Essays
in Radical Empiricism, James did not live to develop the doctrine into a “system.” For
Putnam, see Chapter 11 (“James’s Theory of Truth”) of this volume; for James, see Essays
in Radical Empiricism, 3–19; for Dewey, see Middle Works, 7:142–149.
48. James, The Meaning of Truth, in Works, 2:6–7.

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We do not need, James explains, to postulate, as the idealists do, an absolute

all-witness who relates parts of reality to other parts. In particular, we do not
need a mysterious truth-relation that cannot be experienced but relates
knowers to things known.
We can see now quite clearly why for James the process of verifying, a
process that can be and is experienced, is so important in his theory of truth.
He writes, “The ‘workableness’ which ideas must have, in order to be true,
means particular workings, physical or intellectual, actual or possible, which
they must set up from next to next inside of concrete experience.”49 Lest
“workableness” raise yet again philosophical hackles, let me add that James
does NOT propose to substitute the word “workable” for the word “truth,”
or the latter for the former, as he explains with considerable acerbity in a
little paper called “Two English Critics.”50
I mentioned earlier that what makes pragmatism so appealing is that it is
a philosophy that makes room for our moral lives, that it takes our moral
lives seriously. Morality makes no sense unless you and I live in the same
world, know the same things, can and do compete or cooperate or ignore
each other. Radical empiricism is James’s attempt to explain how that is
possible. From within James’s philosophy, contrary to what he says, pragma-
tism needs radical empiricism as much as radical empiricism needs pragma-
tism. From a different perspective, say, that of Dewey, one can, I believe, be
a pragmatist without accepting the metaphysics of pure experience.
Although I have said nothing about James’s moral philosophy, I have, I
think, demonstrated from various perspectives that James’s pragmatism is a
philosophy that exactly does makes room for our moral lives. He was indeed
a pragmatist.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 146–153.

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9
Pragmatism and Realism
Hilary Putnam
LET ME BEGIN by asking what will undoubtedly seem to many, if not all of
you, a most peculiar question: How did it happen that the first philosopher to
present a completely worked out version of direct realism in the entire history of
modem philosophy was none other than the American pragmatist, William
James?
The peculiarity of this question is expected because James’s pragmatism is
often thought of (especially by those who have accepted Richard Rorty as
their guide to pragmatist ways of thinking) as a species of antirealism. The
very fact that James ardently defended a direct realist account of perception
will come as a shock to you, assuming that is how you are accustomed to
think of pragmatism. And even those of you who are ultimately convinced
by my reading of William James may still want to challenge my claim that
James was the first to successfully promulgate a direct realist picture. Had
Thomas Reid not already just done that? And wasn’t James’s good friend and
friendly (if occasionally scathing) critic, the great founder of pragmatism
itself, Charles Sanders Peirce, also a direct realist years before James was?
What a bizarre view of the history of modern philosophy the essayist seems
to have!
Additionally, some may find the question peculiar because it is not evi-
dent why one should care. Presumably, the title “Pragmatism and Realism”
suggests that my interests here are not primarily historical ones. What I shall
understand by the term “direct realism” today is not a particular metaphysi-

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PRAGMATISM AND REALISM 141
cal theory; rather, it is our implicit and everyday conviction that in experi-
ence we are immediately aware of such common objects as trees and build-
ings, not to mention other people. I am interested in James’s defense of
direct realism—of what he called “natural realism,” because I see overcoming
the traditional picture of perception—a picture according to which our sen-
sations are as much an impassible barrier between ourselves and the objects
we perceive as a mode of access to them—as absolutely necessary if philoso-
phy is to ever stop “spinning its wheels” in a futile attempt to locate a resting
place in the dispute about metaphysical realism and antirealism.1 Although,
in the end, the version of direct realism that I would defend is not James’s; it
was his defense of direct realism that led me to appreciate the issue’s funda-
mental importance.
Let me return to the initial concern: How can a pragmatist also be a
realist?
James: Pragmatist and Realist
Let me begin with the admission that there are antirealist elements in James’s
philosophy (even if he would not have regarded them as such). Although
James’s theory of truth is both subtle and complex (so much so that neither his
critics nor his extravagant admirers have done it justice), I argue elsewhere that,
at the end of the day, it does commit James to a degree of antirealism about the
past (though not exclusively about the past) which is quite unacceptable.2 As
Bertrand Russell aptly recognized, however, it is possible to admire James’s
theory of perception without admiring his theory of truth. This observation,
however, does not really speak to the concern.3 Given that James had a realist
side, how did he reconcile it with a theory of truth that has startlingly antireal-
ist consequences? For two reasons, that too should not really be so great a
puzzle. First, no one seems to have a problem recognizing that Peirce was both
1. For a discussion of the importance of overcoming this picture, see Hilary Putnam,
“Sense, Nonsense and the Senses” (The Dewey Lectures, 1994), The Journal of
Philosophy 91, no. 9 (September 1994): 445–517.
2. See Chapter 11 (“James’s Theory of Truth”) of this volume.
3. For Russell’s view of James, see Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

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a realist and a pragmatist (though I would argue that Peirce’s definition of truth
as the opinion to which inquiry would converge if indefinitely pursued has the
same antirealist consequences about the past, etc., as that of James’s theory).4
The second reason is that neither James nor Peirce admitted that their theories
of truth possessed these antirealist consequences. They were wrong.5 If one re-
jects the facile view that Peirce was a complete realist while James thought
anything could be true provided it was satisfying to believe, then pragmatism
can be seen as a rich source of insights that was not free from errors.
My concern, however, is not with the antirealist side of James’s thought—
manifested, to speak much too quickly and inaccurately, in his identification
of what is true with what will ultimately be “verified” in his own special
sense of the word—but with his realism.
James’s efforts to work out a satisfactory form of realism began with what
can be seen as a turn from psychology to philosophy, were it not misleading to
speak of a “turn” in the case of a thinker who had published essays on philo-
sophical topics beginning in the 1870s. Nevertheless, James did not begin to
devise his own systematic metaphysical view until the 1890s.6 Indeed, in his
monumental work The Principles of Psychology (although he voiced philosoph-
ical opinions on a wide range of subjects), his official stance was that he was
4. See Chapter 2 (“Pragmatism and Verificationism”) of this volume.

5. In Peirce’s case, however, the story is more complex because Peirce was willing to
make empirical assumptions (ones which are, however, incompatible with today’s
physics) to guarantee that his theory of truth would not be incompatible with his re-
alism. Given his fallibilism, Peirce might even be happy that his theory has been re-
futed by a scientific discovery. The discovery in question—by Stephen Hawking—is
the discovery that there is such a thing as the irretrievable destruction of information.
This refutes Peirce’s claim that we are entitled to believe that scientific investigation
could discover the answer to any factual question if sufficiently continued, and that
claim is necessary to Peirce’s defense of the realistic character of his notion of truth.
6. The discovery that James had worked out the essence of his “radical empiri-
cism” as early as 1895–1896 is due to a scholar at Harvard named David Lamberth,
on whose research I am relying in this paragraph. See David C. Lamberth, “James’s
Varieties Reconsidered: Radical Empiricism, the Extra-Marginal and Conversion,”
American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 15, no. 3 (1994): 257–267, and William
James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999). The latter book provides a detailed periodization of the development of
James’s metaphysics.

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bound as a psychologist to assume the working philosophy of the experimen-

tal psychologist, which he took at that time to be a form of dualism coupled
with a belief in psychophysical parallelism.7 The position of The Principles of
Psychology, as far as metaphysics is concerned, is that while this working phi-
losophy is doubtless inadequate, its inadequacy need not trouble the psychol-
ogist qua psychologist.8 James reversed himself, however, in the epilogue to
Psychology: Briefer Course and again in a lecture given to the American
Psychological Association when he declared that good psychology requires a
more coherent metaphysical stance than we presently possess, and in his 1895–
1896 seminar on “The Feelings,” when he began to devise the views that he
would later present to the world as Essays in Radical Empiricism.9
The fundamental idea of James’s new metaphysics is the radical rejection
of the subject/object split. This rejection seems to have been provoked first
of all by James’s attention to the phenomenology of perception. “Phen
omenology” has been used by different philosophers to stand for very differ-
ent projects. What unifies those projects is that they reject the picture of
experience in classical associationist psychology as a false description dic-
tated by a received philosophical view (originally, the view of British empir-
icism) imposed willy-nilly on a very complex set of phenomena and that
they all aim to replace this imposed picture with an accurate and philosoph-
ically useful description of the actual character of experience. In this sense,
one may say that in The Principles of Psychology James was already doing
“phenomenology”—indeed, we know that Husserl was inspired by that
book.10 Now, the received empiricist psychology, coupled with mind/matter
7. James, The Principles of Psychology, 3 vols., in Works, vol. 8.

8. James, in the preface to Principles of Psychology, writes, “This book, assuming that
thoughts and feelings exist and are vehicles of knowledge, thereupon contends that
psychology when she has ascertained the empirical correlation of the various sorts of
thought or feeling with definite conditions of the brain, can go no farther—can go no
farther, that is, as a natural science. If she goes farther she becomes metaphysical” (6)
(emphasis added).
9. This address, “The Knowing of Things Together,” was published in The
Psychological Review in March 1895 and reprinted in Essays in Philosophy, in Works,
5:71–89. See also Psychology: The Briefer Course, in Works, vol. 12, and Essays in Radical
Empiricism, in Works, vol. 3.
10. See Bruce Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology: A Study of “The Principles
of Psychology” (Brooklyn, NY: AMS Press, 1968).

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dualism (as in the working philosophy of The Principles of Psychology), leads

to the following picture of perception: (1) in perception we receive “impres-
sions” which are immaterial, totally different—and separated by a meta-
physical gulf in fact—from all the material objects we normally claim to
perceive, and (2) from the character of our internal mental impressions we
infer how things are in the external physical world.
Nothing, however, could be further from the way perception seems to be,
or further from the “phenomenology” of perception. Phenomenologically,
we seem ourselves to be perceiving tables and chairs (or cabbages and kings),
not immaterial intermediaries.
What we see in James’s first attempts to work out his new metaphysics
is the conviction that the phenomenology of perception is the best guide
to a correct ontology.11 In effect, James has entertained a heretical thought:
What if all the philosophers are wrong and the way it seems to be is the
way it is?
In addition to denying that the immediate objects of our perceptions
are immaterial “sensations” or “impressions,” James further denies that we
are aware of a substantial self (or as he puts it, a substantial “conscious-
ness”).12 In James’s own terminology from “Notes for Philosophy 20b:
Psychological Seminary—The Feelings,” what is given is a “field” of ob-
jects which only upon reflection appear either as perceivable “external”
objects or (when we engage in an alternate mode of reflection) as “sensa-
tions” or affectations of our own subjectivity. The datum, the phenome-
non, the pure experience in itself “has no such inner duplicity,” James
11. I am referring again to the epilogue in James, Psychology: The Briefer Course, 395,
and to “Notes for Philosophy 20b: Psychological Seminary—The Feelings,” in James,
Manuscript Lectures, in Works, 16:212–229.
12. James’s denial of a substantial “consciousness” is, of course, not a denial that we
are conscious! Although this charge is occasionally brought against James, it seems to
depend on the idea that one cannot believe that we are conscious unless there is a thing
which is our “consciousness,” or at least a substantial self (or at least a transcendental
ego, such as Kant’s famous “I think”). What James was denying was the need for any
of these metaphysical items, not the fact that Jones is conscious of the purring of the
cat, or whatever. James’s denial that we are aware of any such item is, of course, a denial
that Kant—who did not think we experience the transcendental self—would have
agreed with, as, for quite different reasons, would Hume.

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writes.13 Here too James regards the phenomenology as the best guide to
an ontology. Reality in itself does not consist of two radically different
sorts of things—subjects and objects—with a problematic relation. Rather,
it consists of the data—the phenomena—and it is just that these can be
thought about in different ways.
As mentioned previously, James is describing the phenomenology of per-
ception; but he is also doing more than that. By suggesting that we can take
that phenomenology seriously in a way that philosophers have long thought
we could not, he is proposing that we return to a standpoint close to what
he calls the “natural realism” of the common man.
A Historical Digression
In trying to defend “natural realism” (even if with some philosophical addi-

tions and revisions), James, though probably unbeknownst to him, pos-
sessed an Aristotelian way of thinking about perception—a way of thinking
that was dominant in the later Middle Ages. Aristotle held that in percep-
tion, the very form of the object perceived is in the mind. To be sure, there
are difficulties with this view.14 Some of those difficulties are with the essen-
tialism involved in the Aristotelian notion of “form,” and those difficulties
become serious when we hold that the form of the object is also in the mind
when we merely think about the object, as well as when we perceive it. It
does seem that in conception, the form Aristotle speaks of is what he regards
as the “essence,” and I find serious difficulties with the idea that we can only
13. “Pure experience” is a term James took from Avenarius, by the way, although he
later seems to have quite forgotten this debt, since he spoke in quite scornful tones of
that thinker’s unreadability! This was pointed out to me by David Lamberth. To my
knowledge, Ignas K. Skrupskelis was the first person to suggest this in his introduction
to Manuscript Lectures. Although the sentence “Experience . . . has no such inner du-
plicity” comes from “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” Essays in Radical Empiricism, in
Works, 3:6, the thought is already present in James’s “Notes.” “But nothing postulated
whose whatness is not of some nature given in fields, that is not of field stuff, da-
tum-stuff, experience stuff, ‘content.’ No pure ego, for example, and no material sub-
stance. This is the hypothesis that we are trying to work out” (228, footnote omitted).
14. See Hilary Putnam, “Aristotle after Wittgenstein,” in Words and Life (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 62.

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think about things whose “essence” is known. It has been suggested to me by

Gisela Striker, however, that in the case of perception, it is unlikely that
Aristotle has so demanding a notion of form in mind. It is plausible that the
form that we receive in perception is simply the sensible form—the color,
shape, texture, sound, or whatever.15 Reading Aristotle in this way, it would
seem that what he is saying is simply that in perception we are aware of the
sensible properties of external things—their shape and/or color, etc.
It may be, of course, that Aristotle also thought that his talk of the same
thing (the form) being in two places at once (in the object perceived and in
the mind) explained how such direct awareness of sensible properties of ex-
ternal things is possible; if so, he was mistaken as the explanation is empty.
(It is also possible, as indeed the rather strange prose of De Anima at this
point suggests might be the case, that he is simply using a figure of speech to
say that we are directly aware of properties of external things, as today the
figure of speech that something is “in my mind” is used.) Whatever Aristotle
may have intended, and whether part of what he intended must be rejected
as unhelpful, he at least believed that we do have an awareness of the sensible
properties of “external” things and that this is not to be cashed out as mean-
ing that we merely have “images” or “representations” of those things before
our minds (as holds the view that has been dominant ever since Descartes).
Furthermore, Aristotle’s ideas were faithfully supported by Aquinas.
Aristotle was aware that perception requires many things—in the case of
sight, the form must somehow be transmitted through the air to the eyes,
and there must be physical modifications in the eyes and (perhaps) in the
cognitive organ (which Aristotle understood to be the heart and blood-
stream) before the form can be in our psyche.16 Perception is supervenient on
15. I did not consider the possibility of this reading in “Aristotle after Wittgenstein,”
and if I had I would have been more charitable to the Aristotelian view.
16. This has been challenged by Myles Burnyeat. For Burnyeat’s paper and a reply defend-
ing the interpretation given here, see Martha C. Nussbaum and Amelie O. Rorty, eds., Essays
on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Victor Caston has pointed to
passages in Aristotle’s biological writings in which Aristotle speculates that cognition may in-
volve building of a kind of representation in the bloodstream! Such representations are not, of
course, in our psyche and are not identical with the perceptual experience; still, the fact that
Aristotle himself was willing to speculate in this way shows that an “Aristotelian” view need
not be hostile to the idea that subpersonal processes of a model-building kind have a role to
play in the etiology of perception (Aristotle as the father of cognitive science?).

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physical processes. That is not, however, an obstacle to thinking that what

results from all these transactions between the organism and the environ-
ment is the perception of the way something is, and not only in the
Pickwickian sense of the presence of a “representation” which in some mys-
terious way refers to the way something is.
By Descartes’s time, however, scholasticism and Aristotelianism were in ill
repute, and the old notion of a “substantial form” smacked of a metaphysics
that was no longer acceptable. As is usually the case in philosophy, the baby
was tossed out with the bathwater, and the representational theory of per-
ception that continues to dominate philosophy and psychology (and today
one can add “cognitive science” as well) came to be the only possible view.
To be a direct realist was to be a “naïve realist,” and being naïve is, of course,
bad. It is against the background of the consensus that has endured for cen-
turies, that “naïve realism” had been refuted once and for all, that James’s
amazing philosophical radicalism has to be appreciated.
The Importance of the Issue
Before I describe James’s version of direct realism, I wish to comment further

about the importance of the issue. One reason I feel I must do this is that
after being at the center of philosophical attention in the first quarter of the
twentieth century, the philosophy of perception receded from view (and al-
most disappeared from serious attention after the death of J. L. Austin in
1960). Indeed, of the great figures in Anglo-American philosophy, only Peter
Strawson maintained a steady, if intermittent, interest in the topic. A second
and less sociological reason is that one aspect of the traditional picture of
perception has now been given up, and this may give the illusion that the
picture is no longer as problematic as it once was.
When I described the traditional picture, I mentioned two elements: in
perception we receive “impressions” that are immaterial, totally different—
separated by a metaphysical gulf—in fact from all the material objects we
normally claim to perceive; and from the character of our internal mental
impressions we infer how things are in the external physical world. Today,
however, a majority of philosophers appear to be hard-core materialists (even
if they prefer the more innocuous label of “naturalist”), and these philoso-
phers would say that our “impressions” are little more than brain events or

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processes. These philosophers would say that the representational theory of

perception no longer requires us to posit a “metaphysical gulf ” between im-
pressions and external objects.
In fact, however, the new view is at least as problematical as the old one.
Philosophers who advocate the new view concede that we are not aware of
our “sensations” as brain processes. We are aware of the blue of the sky as a
color extended over an area, not as a cortical process. The claim advanced by
Donald Davidson and others that the experience is “identical” with a corti-
cal event trades on a notion of “identity” that seems to me entirely meaning-
less.17 Moreover, even if we were to concede that our sense impressions are
brain processes—that is, even if we suppose that the notion of “identity” can
be made sense of in this context (though we know not how!)—the picture
remains one in which our cognitive processes extend no further than an
“interface” between us and the external objects (an interface consisting now
of cortical processes rather than processes in a mental substance). The ob-
jects of perception, those cabbages and cabinet ministers, impinge on our
mind/brains only causally, not cognitively.
This feature of the current materialist version of the representational the-
ory of perception, the feature that the picture of cognition provided by that
picture is in the end a purely causal and not a normative one, has been used
by Richard Rorty to argue against the idea that we can think of reference as
a relation to objects in the world. “We are connected to the world causally,
not semantically,” I have heard Rorty say more than once.18
With these remarks, Rorty builds on an argument against the “given” used
by Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars assumed what I have called the picture of our im-
pressions (our “raw feels,” in his terminology) as an “interface” between us and
the world (although he does not seem to have been willing to identify them
with brain events). Sellars further observed that any given impression-report
(e.g., “I am experiencing E now”) must have a multitude of causes and that
there is nothing in any one of those causes, qua causes, to single it out as “the
17. Davidson has admitted, under the pressure of criticism from W. V. Quine, that
the criterion he originally offered for what he calls “token identity of events of different
types” was fatally flawed. For a fuller discussion of this issue, see Putnam, “Sense,
Nonsense and the Senses,” 477–483.
18. This paragraph and the four that follow are adapted from Hilary Putnam,
“Realism without Absolutes,” in Words and Life, 279, 285.

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appropriate” cause of my verbal response or my verbalized thought. Even if my

verbal report (or my thought) is in part caused by the very quality of the raw
feel I am trying to describe, it may still be a misreport—my report cannot
causally depend only on the quality of my “raw feel.” If it is to be a report in a
language with stable meanings, it must also depend on my prior linguistic
conditioning, on attention, and on “set,” etc. Like Rorty, Sellars thought that
to postulate a semantic relation between linguistic items and nonlinguistic
objects which determines when I am successfully “referring” is to postulate a
mystery relation.
Rorty generalized Sellars’s argument (once accepted it invites immediate
generalization) and concluded that if we are connected to the world “caus-
ally but not semantically” (a fair summary of Sellars’s view), then our words
have no determinate real counterparts. Sellars attempted to avoid going as
far as Rorty did when he postulated a holistic relation between our concep-
tual schemes and reality that he called “picturing”; postulating further in
Peircean fashion, with the progress of science our schemes come to “picture”
the world more and more accurately. Rorty, however, rejects Sellarsian “pic-
turing” on the grounds that it is as occult a relation as reference allegedly is.
Rorty and Sellars are right in saying that any given event can be traced to
a multitude of different causes. As William James wrote in a different con-
text:
Not a sparrow falls to the ground but some of the remote conditions of his fall
are to be found in the milky way, or in our federal constitution, or in the early
history of Europe. That is to say, alter the milky way, alter the [facts of our]
federal constitution, alter the facts of our barbarian ancestry, and the universe
would so far be a different universe from what it now is. One fact involved in
the difference might be that the particular little street-boy who threw the
stone which brought down the sparrow might not find himself opposite the
sparrow at that particular moment; or, finding himself there, he might not be
in that particular serene and disengaged mood of mind which expressed itself
in throwing the stone. But, true as all this is, it would be very foolish for any-
one who was inquiring the cause of the sparrow’s fall to overlook the boy as
too personal, proximate, and so to speak anthropomorphic an agent, and to
say that the true cause [of the sparrow’s fall] is the federal constitution, the
westward migration of the Celtic race, or the structure of the milky way. If we
proceeded on that method, we might say with perfect legitimacy that a friend
of ours, who slipped on the ice upon his door-step and cracked his skull, some

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months after dining with thirteen at the table, died because of that ominous
feast.19
Yet to conclude (from the fact that there is a great difference between asking
for the referent of a term and asking for the causes of a particular “tokening”
of that term) that we must abandon the idea that there is a relation of refer-
ence that holds between some of our terms and objects in the world is to
engage in a gesture of repudiation with respect to our conception of our-
selves as thinkers in a world that is so sweeping as, in the end, to invite the
suspicion that it is simply an empty pose. In this suspicion, I am naturally
joined by metaphysical realists. Metaphysical realists, of course, deplore the
rejection by both Rorty and Sellars of the very idea of semantical words-
world relations. If, however (as most of the contemporary ones do), they also
wish to endorse a “bald” version of naturalism, they cannot simply posit a
semantical words-world relation; they must also show that it can be reduced
to nonsemantical relations and facts—to posit irreducible semantic relations
is no better from their point of view than to posit immaterial sense data.20
Attempts to reduce semantic relations to nonsemantic ones have been
utter failures—to the point that we presently have no idea what such a re-
duction could conceivably look like.21
It was in this philosophical climate that I advanced my own attempt at
a “middle way” between antirealism and metaphysical realism (my so-
called internal realism) in the 1970s and 1980s.22 While I still defend some
of the ideas that were involved in those attempts (in particular the denial
that reality dictates one unique description is as central to my thinking as
it ever was), it is now clear that that attempt too was fatally flawed by its
allegiance to the traditional conception of our sensations as an “interface”
between us and the world. Thus, I can understand from my own experi-
ence how, even if we did not very much discuss the philosophy of percep-
19. James, The Will to Believe, in Works, 6:216–17.

20. I owe the term “bald naturalism” to John McDowell, Mind and World
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
21. For a critical examination of such attempts, see Hilary Putnam, Renewing
Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
22. A name which I now find to have been an unhappy one, for the reasons given
in Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense and the Senses,” 461–463.

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tion in the 1970s and 1980s, we were—and too many of us remain—the

inheritors of a Cartesian (or Cartesian cum materialist) picture of percep-
tion, a picture that had become all the more coercive for not being criti-
cally discussed in the way it was at the time Russell wrote The Analysis of
Mind—a book that, for all its retention of parts of the traditional picture,
is extremely aware of the difficulties to which that picture leads, as most of
today’s philosophers are not.23
Another (Shorter) Historical Digression
Even if you are now convinced (I trust) that it is important to overcome the
representational theory of perception, the picture of our sensations as “be-
tween” us and those “external objects,” there is still the question as to our
historical accuracy in giving James and not Thomas Reid the credit for being
the first modern philosopher to revive direct realism. It is true that Thomas
Reid thoroughly understood the disastrous consequences of the representa-
tional theory and that (both in the Inquiry and in the Intellectual Powers) he
called—indeed, he vigorously polemicized—for a return to a direct real-
ism.24 My reason for not ultimately counting Reid as a successful advocate of
the direct realist cause is that he retains the idea that sensations are noncon-
ceptual and internal “signs” (as opposed to sensings of what is there) as an
essential part of his epistemology and ontology. For example, Reid writes:
[In perception] there is something which may be called the sign, and some-
thing which is signified to us . . . by that sign. . . . Thus when I grasp an ivory
ball in my hand, I have a certain sensation of touch. Although this has no si-
militude to anything material, yet, by the laws of my constitution, it is imme-
23. Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921).
24. See John J. Haldane, “Reid, Scholasticism and Current Philosophy of Mind,”
in The Philosophy of Thomas Reid, ed. Melvin Delgarno and Eric Matthews (Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1989), 285. See Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the
Principles of Common Sense [1764], ed. Derek R. Brookes (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1997), and Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man [1785], ed.
Derek R. Brookes (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).

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diately followed by a conception and belief that there is in my hand a hard

smooth body of a spherical character.25
This differs from the standard Cartesian account only in adding that, owing
to “the laws of my constitution,” I am able to form a “conception” of the
object itself from this sensation even though it “has no similitude to any-
thing material.” This power, however, necessarily appears to be something
mysterious in Reid’s account, since the mind has as “input” something dif-
ferent in kind from what it forms conceptions and beliefs about. Similar
remarks apply to Peirce’s defense of direct realism—indeed, Peirce cites Reid
as the one who got it right.26
James’s Radical Empiricism
James’s name for this area of his philosophy is “radical empiricism”; James
does not, however, use the term “direct realism,” but the much better term
“natural realism” appears a number of times in his Essays in Radical
Empiricism, and he repeatedly insists that radical empiricism is close to
natural realism, or revives it, or shows that it can be maintained.27 We have
already provided an answer to the puzzle as to how a pragmatist came to
revive natural realism; it was James’s typically pragmatist insistence that we
take seriously the way in which we think about—and have to think about—
perceptual experience in the course of living our lives that virtually forced
natural realism upon him.28 And James is certainly correct that in the course
of living our lives, we have to think of ourselves as living in what he calls “a
common world,” that each of us must think that she is aware of the other’s
body and not simply a representation of it, and we all have to think that we
25. Quoted in Haldane, “Reid, Scholasticism and Current Philosophy of Mind,”

298.
26. Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:56, 444, 539; 6:95.
27. “Natural realism” is a much better term, as pointed out in J. L. Austin, Sense
and Sensibilia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). There is a great deal that is
problematic with the traditional epistemologist’s use of “direct” and “indirect.”
28. It is for the same reason that Dewey followed James in this and that Peirce
earlier sought—even if, in my view, unsuccessfully—a return to direct realism.

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are aware of many of the same objects. It is true that in elaborating a phi-
losophy which took this idea as correct, James was led to some elaborate
metaphysical construction which I do not presently have time to discuss.
For that reason, toward the end of this essay I shall address the further ques-
tion “To what extent can we preserve natural realism without accepting all
of James’s metaphysics of radical empiricism?” I shall further suggest that
we can find resources for doing this in the writings of J. L. Austin.29 Even
if, however, James’s way was not the only way, or even the best way to de-
fend natural realism, the fact remains that it was the first way to be pro-
posed after the fateful Cartesian turn in modern philosophy.30
James’s way involved what Russell (not James himself, for whom the term
“monist” was anathema) described as a “neutral monist” ontology. In such
an ontology, the properties and relations we experience are the stuff of the
universe; there is no nonexperiential “substratum” (this is an idea of James’s
with which Russell was sympathetic), and these experienced or experience-
able properties and relations (James is unfortunately a little vague at this
crucial point) make up both minds and material objects.
Moreover, minds and material objects in a sense “overlap”; the very thing
I experience as a sensation of red is, in another context, also what I refer to
as “a patch of color on the wall.” Illusions do not prove that we never “di-
rectly experience” external objects; in James’s radical empiricist metaphysics,
what the phenomena of illusions go to show is that not every bit of pure
experience has the status of being a part of a “real” object, not that none do.
Of course, there is the obvious objection that the skeptical epistemologi-
cal problem has not been “solved.” In James’s account, there is no absolutely
certain way to know when we are subject to an illusion and when we are not.
But James would reply that the problem is even worse for the traditional
theory. As James puts it for the Berkleyan school:
Our lives are a congeries of solipsisms, out of which in strict logic only a God
could compose a universe even of discourse. . . . If the body you actuate be not
the very body that I see there, but some duplicate body of your own with
29. For a fuller account see Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense and the Senses.”
30. Charles Taylor has objected that I am leaving Hegel out of account here. Even
if Hegel can be seen as a kind of direct realist (which is problematic), he seems to have
had no influence on James in this respect.

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which that has nothing to do, we belong to different universes, you and I, and
for me to speak of you is folly.31
In short, James argues that several minds, each acquainted only with its own
private objects, could not arrive by any process of inference at knowledge or
even thought of one another.
The advantage of pragmatism over traditional “foundationalist” epistemol-
ogy, in James’s view, is that the way in which pragmatist philosophers answer
skeptical doubts is the way in which doubts are answered in practice, by ap-
pealing to tests that in fact work in our lives. If I think that what I see may be
an illusion, I can try to touch it, or look at it from a different position, or ask
other people to take a look. There are not, in James’s view, two sets of criteria
for being “real”—commonsense criteria and philosophical criteria.
With so much, Russell was able to agree in The Analysis of Mind. In a
chapter of that work dealing with sensations and images (Chapter 8), Russell
heartily endorses James’s view that “the dualism of mind and matter cannot
be allowed as metaphysically valid,” writing that “on this subject we may
again quote William James. He points out that when we say we merely
‘imagine’ things, there are no such effects as would ensue if the things were
what we call ‘real.”’32 It is at this point Russell quotes James at length and
then restates the point in his own terminology: the difference between so-
called ‘mental’ phenomena and ‘physical’ phenomena is a difference in the
causal laws obeyed, not a fundamental dualism.
But there is an important aspect of what James calls “natural realism” with
which Russell was unable to agree (although it is not clear that he realized
that this was a point of disagreement). For immediately after this, Russell
proceeds to give precisely the description of experience that James had pre-
viously rebelled against in The Principles of Psychology: experience consists of
color patches, etc., and we think we see tables and chairs because we make
“inferences” of various kinds!33 Evidently Russell is willing to follow James
about color patches (“the sensation that we have when we see a patch of
colour simply is that patch of colour, an actual constituent of the physical
world”) but not about tables and chairs.34
31. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, in Works, 3:37–38.

32. Russell, The Analysis of Mind, 137.
33. Ibid., 140.
34. Ibid., 142.

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Here is an example (my own rather than his) of what bothers Russell:
while it is true that we normally see tables and chairs as just that, very often
we do not see the side away from us; yet seeing something as a chair is seeing
it as something which has an unseen side, and one of a certain kind. Because
that knowledge, the knowledge of the unseen side, cannot be perceptual
(this seems evident to Russell) it must be inferred.35 We can only find what
is really given in sensation by stripping away all “mnemic” (i.e., conceptual)
contributions. But James’s view is that if there is an original nonconceptual
element in perception, we are unable to get back to it (or can get to it only
in free reverie—precisely when we are not cognizing!). The question of how
much of what we perceive is “given” and how much is “added” is, he says in
one place, like the question “Does a man walk more essentially on his left leg
or his right?”36 Although James was not willing to go as far as Kant and treat
perception as a passive exercise of the same conceptual powers that are exer-
cised in judgment, the practical effect of this part of his doctrine is the
same.37 What we perceive, in so far as the perception is available to us as a
source of knowledge, is a sort of fusion of sensation and conception. Given
his constant emphasis on the richness and variety of what is given in experi-
ence, he could never accept the view that all we really see are color patches!
The Russell of The Analysis of Mind was strongly influenced by James, but
only so far: his direct realism stopped with the color patches. James’s natural
realism is full bodied.
James’s Excesses
While I admire this full-bodied natural realism, I indicated earlier that

James’s “radical empiricism” contains elements that I find excessively meta-
physical. One such element is James’s restriction of what there is to “pure
experience”; however we understand that puzzling notion, this appears to be
35. In the “Notes” for the seminar on “the Feelings,” James insists that this “point-
ing” to something more is part of what he calls the “content” of the “datum”; this is
the exact opposite of Russell’s view.
37. For a recent discussion of the importance of this insight of Kant’s, see McDowell,
Mind and World.

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too restrictive. Although James does at times try to allow not only what is
perceptually experienced but even what is conceived as “pure experience,”
this strain in his thought is never worked out and is, indeed, in conflict with
his own account of conceptual thinking. For James, the world is the experi-
enceable world; since James has an admirable reluctance to rule out any kind
of talk that does real work in our lives, he is forced to reinterpret talk of
unobservables in physics, of counterfactual connections, and of mathemati-
cal talk, etc., in ways that are unconvincing and ultimately unsuccessful.
In another respect, however, James’s ontology is not restrictive enough.
To explain what is meant by this, I shall close by bringing in the great British
philosopher J. L. Austin, a second figure in the history of natural realism’s
revival. I have ventured a hypothesis as to the origin of James’s defense of
natural realism. I do not know, however, the etiology of Austin’s rejection of
the whole idea of sense data as private representations of an external reality,
except that that rejection may have come very early in Austin’s life.38 In any
case, he is very likely to have been acquainted at least with Russell’s account
of James’s views in The Analysis of Mind.
It was, by the way, through reflecting on Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia, as I
did repeatedly starting in the 1970s, that I first began to take direct realism
seriously. Although my views are now closer to Austin’s than to James’s, I
must admit that I was not at first convinced by Austin.39 Only after I began
to teach courses on the philosophy of William James and to focus on his
radical empiricism did I begin to see that the endless pattern of recoil in
modern philosophy (from extravagant versions of realism to equally extrav-
agant versions of antirealism and back again) can never be brought to rest
38. In 1936 (Austin was born in 1911), Austin and Isaiah Berlin held a class on C. I.
Lewis’s book Mind and the World-Order [1929] (New York; Dover, 1956), in which
Austin characterized Lewis’s doctrine of qualia—specific, sensible characteristics—as
“complete nonsense.” See Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions, ed. Henry Hardy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 107. Unfortunately, Berlin does not
give Austin’s grounds, and so one cannot tell whether this means that Austin already
held the views that he was to defend in Sense and Sensibilia.
39. In Hilary Putnam, “Models and Reality,” reprinted in Putnam, Philosophical
Papers, vol. 3: Realism and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). I
explicitly rejected Austin’s views. It now seems to me that this rejection led me directly
into a cul-de-sac with respect to the realism/antirealism issue. For an explanation of
this remark, see Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense and the Senses.”

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unless we challenge the picture of the mind, and particularly the picture of
perception, that makes it seem impossible to take our ordinary talk of per-
ceiving and thinking about objects seriously unless one reinterprets it in
terms of a representational theory of the mind. Understanding how that
theory fails to provide the desired “foundation” for our ordinary talk (since
it is just as much a mystery, in the end, how the supposed “mental represen-
tations” can refer to objects as it is how our ordinary talk can do so!) makes
it seem Rortian nihilism must be the only option that remains (although
that too, I would argue, is only the illusion of an option, a fata morgana
which disappears the moment one tries to embrace it).40
The most striking feature of the view put forward in Sense and Sensibilia,
at least on a first reading, is the rejection of something that the tradition
takes as self-evident—namely, that even nonveridical experience must be
analyzed on a perceiver-percipient model. If I dream, or am subject to the
illusion, or even hallucinate that I see a building, I really do perceive some-
thing on the traditional view—it is just that what I perceive is not a physical
something but a “mental” something. James (and Russell when he was fol-
lowing James) retained just this feature of the traditional view. To be sure,
they denied that such mental somethings are made of a different “stuff” from
the physical things (this denial was a consequence of their different versions
of “neutral monist” metaphysics), but they accepted the perceiver-percipient
model. But on Austin’s still more radical approach, when, for example, I
dream that I see a building, I do not perceive anything—I only seem to
perceive something. With one stroke, Austin banishes the last vestige of the
tradition’s “sense data.” (Well, not entirely, you may object—we still feel
pains, for example, and a pain is not a physical object. That is true, but
Austin’s point is that the tradition regards feeling a pain and seeing a table as
essentially similar—in both cases I have “sensations,” and it is the use of the
notion of a “sensation” in connection with perceptual experiences, be they
“veridical” or “nonveridical,” that Austin regards as complete nonsense.)
However, to even sketch Austin’s view would require another essay as long
as this one has been. I will only mention one obvious objection to Austin’s
account (the one that bothered me for a long time): if we give up the idea
40. For a discussion of Rorty’s position, see Putnam, Renewing Philosophy; see also
“Realism without Absolutes” and “The Question of Realism,” in Words and Life, 279–
294, 295–314.

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that there is a mental object in the case of nonveridical experience, how are
we to explain the similarity between the nonveridical experience and a cor-
responding perception? To be sure, Austin’s account does not prevent us
from saying that how an experience seems depends on our neural state in
such-and-such ways; these causal dependencies are matters of scientific fact.
But do we not want to say more than that? Do we not want to say that there
is something identical, a “common factor,” present in the two experiences?
Austin’s view, which I have come to share, is that one has here only the illu-
sion of an explanation.41
Austin’s strategy was not available to James; James’s whole metaphysical
outlook is that everything that seems to be present in experience is, in some
sense, there—is, as James sometimes puts it, a “bit” of pure experience. To
go from James’s bold presentation of his metaphysics of radical empiricism
to Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia is to go from a bold metaphysical construc-
tion with deep roots in traditional empiricist metaphysics (roots which
James repeatedly acknowledged, even as he tried to correct what he saw as
the errors of that empiricism) to a bitingly cold attempt to achieve a certain
kind of clarity. To some, this will seem a loss. But at the end of the day, it is,
I believe, a gain; and it even preserves, I believe, the genuine moment of
insight in James’s ambitious metaphysical project, which was James’s realiza-
tion that our ordinary ways of talking and thinking about our perceptual
experiences should be taken seriously in philosophy. In taking so seriously
our commonsense picture of ourselves as having access to a common
world—taking that picture so seriously because it, and the actions that are
interwoven with it and give it content, are essential to our lives together, not
just as knowers but as moral agents—William James was, in the best sense,
both a “pragmatist” and a “realist.”
41. For further discussion see Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense and the Senses,” 473–483.

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10
What the Spilled Beans

Can Spell
The Difficult and Deep Realism
of William James
WHAT IS IT ABOUT philosophy that makes long dead philosophers interest-

ing in a way that long dead physicists are not? Why do we read philosophers
of earlier ages not merely out of historical interest, as we might read Newton,
Dalton, or Darwin, but, in a sense, as if they have been writing for us? Part
of the answer lies in the fact that the questions to which the great philoso-
phers of the past sought answers are questions that still concern us. Plato and
Aristotle, for example, asked, “How should one live?” and that question is as
pressing now as it was in 400 bc. Of course, even when we feel in sympathy
with ideas that come from past philosophers, we can never simply accept
their views. Not only are the circumstances of our lives different from theirs
but intervening generations of philosophers have considered the questions
from different perspectives, raised objections to the positions of their prede-
cessors, and offered alternatives that had not been considered before.
Sometimes, to be sure, it will turn out that what seemed to be a new position
is merely an old one in a new guise, but then it is up to us to show that this
is so. In short, when we read philosophers of an earlier age, we cannot ignore
everything that has happened in philosophy since then.

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While the question “How should one live?” is a perennial question, it

sometimes seems as if the more technical metaphysical and epistemological
issues in philosophy change quite drastically over time. One drastic change
occurred in metaphysics and epistemology at the beginning of the modern era,
which is characterized not only by Galilean science but also by Cartesian phi-
losophy. Nevertheless, when we read the great philosophers, we find not only
that they possess that strange quality we call “depth’ but, often, that the meta-
physical and epistemological questions they considered are our questions and
that they anticipate ideas which we have come to think of as “contemporary,”
even ideas which one has come to think one invented oneself. All this happens
when one reads William James. But we do not read William James simply out
of filial piety, even when we agree with him. Because our predecessors wrote in
different intellectual milieus, and wrote in opposition to philosophical posi-
tions and arguments that have gone quite out of fashion (James wrote against
Anglo-American idealism, a position which most contemporary philosophers
reject out of hand), their formulations often sound very strange. The effort to
make sense of strange formulations of familiar ideas, by placing them in their
unfamiliar contexts, enables us to understand them in greater depth.
This is as true of Plato as it is of Kant; it is, however, particularly worth
saying of James, since philosophy departments pay less attention to James
than to the other great philosophers of the last hundred years. Because James
writes in an elegant literary style, it has often been supposed that his thought
must be shallow; in fact, he is a difficult and deep philosopher. We can think
of no better way to show that James is a philosopher well worth reading than
by suggesting two ways in which one might approach the philosophy of his
major texts: Pragmatism, Essays in Radical Empiricism, and The Will to Believe
and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy.1 We do not intend to belittle his
monumental Psychology; his most widely read book, Varieties of Religious
Experience; or his other writings.2 Our aim is not to be comprehensive but to
show, from different starting points, how key elements of his philosophical
thinking hang together. As Dewey says somewhere, seeing meaning is seeing
1. James, Pragmatism, in Works, vol. 1, Essays in Radical Empiricism, in Works, vol.

3, and The Will to Believe, in Works, vol. 6.
2. James, The Principles of Psychology, 3 vols., in Works, vol. 8, and The Varieties of
Religious Experience, in Works, vol. 13.

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W H AT T H E SPIL L E D BE A NS C A N SPE L L 161
connections. The great philosophers see connections not only between the
issues and questions raised in different subfields of philosophy, such as meta-
physics and ethics, but between philosophical issues and everyday life. In
1907, late in his life, James wrote to a philosophy critic, Dickinson S. Miller:3
Dear Miller,
I got your letter about “Pragmatism,” etc., some time ago. . . . I sent you a
week ago a “Journal of Philosophy” with a word more about Truth in it, written
at you mainly: But I hardly dare hope that I have cleared up my position. A
letter from Strong, two days ago, written after receiving a proof of that paper,
still thinks that I deny the existence of realities outside the thinker; and Perry
. . . accused Pragmatists (though he doesn’t name me) of ignoring or denying
that the real objects play any part in deciding what ideas are true. I confess that
such misunderstandings seem to me hardly credible. . . .
Apparently it all comes from the word Pragmatism—and a most unlucky
word it may prove to have been. I am a natural realist. The world per se may be
likened to a cast of beans on a table. By themselves they spell nothing. An on-
looker may group them as he likes. He may simply count them all and map
them. He may select groups and name these capriciously, or name them to suit
certain extrinsic purposes of his. Whatever he does, so long as he takes account
of them, his account is neither false nor irrelevant. If neither, why not call it true?
It fits the beans-minus-him, and expresses the total facts of the beans-plus-him.
Truth in this total sense is partially ambiguous, then. If he simply counts or
maps, he obeys a subjective interest as much as if he traces figures. Let that stand
for pure “intellectual” treatment of the beans, while grouping them variously
stands for non-intellectual interests. All that . . . I contend for is that there is no
“truth” without some interest, and that non-intellectual interests play a part as
well as the intellectual ones.4 Whereupon we are accused of denying the beans,
or denying being in any way constrained by them! It’s too silly!
In fewer than 200 words, James expresses a number of key themes in his
thought. He says, for example, that he is a “natural realist,” that his aim (as
stated in his Essays in Radical Empiricism) is to produce a metaphysics and
3. James to Dickerson S. Miller, 5 August 1907, The Letters of William James, ed.
Henry James Jr. (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 2:295–296.
4. James to Dickerson S. Miller, 5 August 1907, The Letters of William James, ed.

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epistemology close to the natural realism of the common man. The “com-
mon man” takes himself to perceive the ordinary objects of everyday life,
whereas philosophers since Descartes have interposed certain types of pri-
vate entities (“ideas” or “impressions” or “sense data”) between the perceiver
and that world of things and events in a public space and time. They have
then struggled valiantly but unsuccessfully to reconstruct a public world out
of what James calls a “congeries of solipsisms.” James’s response is to take
experiences seriously, to say that whatever is experienced is real, and that
since we unreflectingly experience a public world, it is indeed a public world
in which we live. Reading James will provide one with arguments in favor of
natural realism, with an intellectual justification for believing in our studies
what all of us believe outside in any case.
But the public world we experience is not a “ready-made” world. What
James writes concerning the beans fits very well with a theme that he strikes
repeatedly in Pragmatism, particularly in Lectures 2 and 7: the role of what we
may call our conceptual contribution to determining truth. James agrees with
his older friend C. S. Peirce, the inventor of the name “Pragmatism,” that re-
ality—what Peirce refers to as “external permanencies” or as “nothing hu-
man”—constrains what we call true; but James argues that we are not as com-
pletely constrained as Peirce thought. There is—to use a term from W. V.
Quine—some “underdetermination.” In the space provided by the underde-
termination, we have some conceptual freedom, some freedom to choose one
or another alternative description. No single unique description is imposed
upon us by nonhuman reality. How that space is filled depends on our inter-
ests. “There is,” James points out, “no ‘truth’ without some interest.” In short,
James draws attention to the interpenetration of facts and values, to the fact
that our beliefs concerning facts and values form a seamless web.
From these themes, one could continue in different directions. One could
develop the doctrine of what Hilary Putnam has called “conceptual relativity.”
In some cases, the alternative descriptions that we are free to develop while still
“fitting the beans” correspond to different values, and indeed to incompatible
actions, and in such cases we have to choose between them. But these choices
need not be permanent; on their days off, astronomers can be awed by the
starry heavens as was Kant (who was an outstanding astrophysicist). In other
cases, what look like different descriptions may in fact be the same; that is,
they may contain the same information holistically. James says as much in

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Lecture 2 in Pragmatism. In physics, for example, theories can sometimes look

incompatible although they are actually equivalent descriptions.
Contemporary philosophers have been interested in the idea that theories
are underdetermined not only by all the currently available evidence but also by
the total possible evidence; unlike these philosophers, James extends this view
to ethics. There are certainly ethical views that are wrong; but one way of read-
ing the last lecture in Pragmatism and the essay “The Moral Philosopher and
the Moral Life” is to see James as saying that there need not be just one “ideal
morality” waiting for us to find it at the end of history, that even if we find a
morality that is ideal by the only criterion that makes sense to James—that of
being the most “inclusive ideal” we can find, the ideal that reconciles as much
as possible all the conflicting ideals—it might be that we could have settled on
a different reconciling ideal if the course of history had been different.5
The beans picture may be misleading if taken the wrong way. If one takes it
as meaning that James thinks that reality consists of some determinate set of
“objects,” one is already reading too much definiteness into it. For James, the
“reality” that corresponds to the beans is the whole flux of what he calls “pure
experience,” and pure experience, unlike beans, doesn’t divide into discrete
units, or at least not in just one way. There is never a tidy line in the flux mark-
ing off the end of one piece of pure experience and the beginning of another,
and James thinks that it is impossible to conceptualize the “fluxiness” of pure
experience adequately. Nevertheless, it is amazing how much of James’s way of
looking at things is captured in this letter in one vivid image.
There is a different and equally fruitful way into James’s thought. Once
can begin with the essays collected under the title The Will to Believe and
Other Essays, particularly with “The Will to Believe” itself, and with “The
Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” and perhaps also “The Sentiment of
Rationality.” These essays connect with many of the lectures in Pragmatism,
particularly with “Pragmatism and Humanism” and with the final lecture,
“Pragmatism and Religion.” Here James brings to our attention a somewhat
different set of ideas, namely:
1. Ethical naturalism. Although as a psychologist, James believes that

religious belief has great power to release our psychic energy, he in-
5. James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” in The Will to Believe in
Works; 6.

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sists that the existence of objective value does not depend on the ex-
istence of God: “Whether a God exist, or whether no God exist, in
yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an ethical repub-
lic here below.”6
2. Anti-reductionism. “Our ideals have many sources. They are not all
explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained, and pains to
be escaped.”7
3. Pluralism. Not only do our ideals have many sources but James also
recognizes with regret that they cannot all be realized. Our aim can
only be to seek those goods “most apt to be member[s] of a more
inclusive whole.”8
4. Experimentalism. What that whole is can be found out only by trial
and error, and requires that we be “open to the voice of complaint.”9
James see these four interrelated points, especially when one stresses plural-
ism, both as an argument for and as embodying the best in democracy.
Speaking particularly to philosophers, James warns against system-building
in ethics. While the desire for system has produced some great books, any
system is bound to leave out important features of the moral life and to gloss
over the important insight that every moral situation is unique. Philosophers’
writings on ethics, he concludes, “must more and more ally themselves with a
literature that is confessedly tentative and suggestive rather than dogmatic . . .
they must more and more abandon the old-fashioned, clear-cut, and would-be
‘scientific’ form.”10
James’s views in metaphysics and epistemology—his natural realism, his
emphasis on our conceptual contribution to all our knowledge, and, conse-
quently, his recognition of the interpenetration of facts and values—connect
with his views in ethics: his pluralistic, antireductionist naturalism and exper-
imentalism. Again, there are at least two approaches to appreciating this. First,
James’s own most detailed explanation of the phrase “radical empiricism”:
6. Ibid., 150.
7. Ibid., 144.
8. Ibid., 158.
9. Ibid., 159.
10. Ibid.

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Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate, next of a statement of fact,

and finally of a generalized conclusion.
The postulate is that the only things that shall be debateable among phi-
losophers shall be definable in terms drawn from experience. . . .
The statement of fact is that the relations between things . . . are just as
much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so not less so, than
the things themselves.
The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience hold
together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experi-
ence. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous
trans-empirical connective support.11
“Empiricism” is, of course, a general term for doctrines which hold that all
knowledge derives from experience. James calls his empiricism radical be-
cause he sees traditional empiricism as denying something that presents itself
in experience—namely, relations. While traditional empiricism—say
Humean empiricism—maintains that all knowledge derives from experi-
ence, it also holds that our experiences are not what, prior to philosophical
reflection, we take them to be. We think we see one thing pushing another,
or affecting another, that we perceive causal connections, and all sorts of
other relations. But, traditional empiricists argued, we do not really perceive
that. We only perceive color-qualia at points in visual space, etc. And then
they proceed to explain—in Hume’s case, by principles of association—how
we come by our erroneous belief that we perceive relations between these
objects of perception.
James rejects this picture, and rejects it on empiricist grounds; that makes
his position a radical empiricism. In our words, not his, he holds that the
presumption should be that if it seems to us that we perceive something as
“bringing about” something or “leading to” something else (these are favor-
ite examples of “conjunctive relations” for James), then, pace Hume, we do
perceive such things as bringing about and leading to. Although James does
not mention values in the account of radical empiricism we have just quoted,
he does, in fact, hold that we experience values: we experience some things
as hideous and others as charming; we feel the obligations that other people’s
claims impose on us, etc. The presumption of the radical empiricist is that

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values are real; the burden of proof is on the skeptic to show that it is other-
wise. Given that values are experienced, given the interpenetration of facts
and values, James’s fallibilistic and pluralistic stance toward moral judgments
appears to us inevitable.
But perhaps the best answer to the question of what unifies James’s
thought is a nonphilosophical answer, an answer that James himself suggests
at the end of the first lecture in Pragmatism:
Not only Walt Whitman could write, “Who touches this book touches a
man.” The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men. One’s
sense of the essential personal flavour in each one of them, typical but inde-
scribable, is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophical educa-
tion.12
In the end, perhaps, the most important reason to read William James is to
“touch” William James.

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11
James’s Theory of Truth
Hilary Putnam
THE PRONOUNCEMENTS on the nature of truth in Pragmatism evoked

howls of indignation (e.g., Russell)1 as well as exaggerated praise. The howls
(and some of the praise) came from readers who thought that James identi-
fied truth as whatever it gives us “satisfaction” to believe: the critics believed
that this amounted to irrationalism, while the enthusiasts thought that the
idea that truth is jibing with reality deserves to be abandoned (Rorty), and
the Italian pragmatist Giovanni Papini thought that irrationalism is a good
thing (Perry).2
The howlers and the enthusiasts were careless readers, however. They virtu-
ally ignored what James wrote about truth elsewhere. But it is not easy to say
in a few words what James did think about truth, for, as I shall argue, James’s
view developed in complicated ways as he worked out his metaphysical sys-
tem. In the present essay, I isolate the elements in James’s theory of truth and
show how they were linked by James’s metaphysics of radical empiricism.
Here is a rough outline: I shall first describe two strains in James’s thought:
(1) a Peircean strain (as we shall see, this strain is quite strong, but James’s
1. Bertrand Russell, “William James’s Conception of Truth,” in Philosophical Essays

(London: Longmans, Green, 1910).
2. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1982); Ralph Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2
vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 2:570–579.

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critics ignore it), and (2) the un-Peircean idea that truth is partly shaped by
our interests. After that, I examine two more strains which reflect the meta-
physics of radical empiricism, even though in Pragmatism James (unsuccess-
fully) attempted to avoid presupposing it. These are (3) a realist strain,
summed up in the claim that truth involves agreement with reality, although
that agreement is not one single relation, and (4) an empiricist strain,
summed up in the claim that “truth happens to an idea.” I also describe the
way in which these strains reappear in the Meaning of Truth. My purpose
here is almost entirely exegetical; nevertheless, I shall close with a brief com-
ment on James’s theory.
1. The Peircean Strain
Peirce famously defined truth as “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately

agreed to by all who investigate.”3 In spite of the many undeniable differ-
ences between James’s metaphysical system and Peirce’s, variants of this defi-
nition abound in James’s writing.
They appear long before Pragmatism. In the concluding paragraph of the
relatively early (1878) “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as
Correspondence,” we find the characteristically Jamesean idea that human
beings “help to create” truth combined with the Peircean idea that the true
judgments are the ones that we are fated to believe, not at any given instant,
but in the long run, on the basis of “the total upshot of experience.” Let us
look at this passage closely. Here is how the paragraph opens:
I, for my part, cannot escape the consideration forced upon me at every turn,
that the knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foot-hold anywhere,
and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply exist-
ing. The knower is an actor, and coefficient of the truth on one side, whilst on
the other he registers the truth which he helps to create. Mental interests,
hypotheses, postulates, insofar as they are bases for human action—action
which to a great extent transforms the world—help to make the truth which
they declare.4


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JA M E S’S T H EORY OF T RU T H 169
Here the idea that we help to make the truth is spelled out in an innocuous
way: our actions partially determine what will happen, and hence what will
be true of the world. (In his later writings James will propose a more contro-
versial sense in which we help to make truth.) But James is not primarily
thinking of historical truth even here. For he immediately raises the question
whether “judgments of the should-be” can correspond to reality and responds
by declaring that this possibility should not be ruled out:
We know so little about the ultimate nature of things, or of ourselves, that it

would be sheer folly dogmatically to say that an ideal rational order may not
be real. The only objective criterion of reality is coerciveness, in the long run,
over thought. . . . By its very essence, the reality of a thought is proportionate
to the way it grasps us. Its intensity, its seriousness—its interest, in a word—
taking these qualities, not at any given instant, but as shown by the total up-
shot of experience. If judgments of the should-be are fated to grasp us in this
way they are what “correspond.” The ancients placed the conception of Fate
at the bottom of things—deeper than the gods themselves. “The fate of
thought,” utterly barren and indeterminate as such a formula is, is the only
unimpeachable regulative Law of Mind.5
Although “the reality of a thought” is an unfortunate expression, James is

not here confusing how a thought “grabs” us with the reality of things exter-
nal to us (“the objective criterion of reality” in the sense of the criterion for
something’s being real). What he means is that the criterion for something’s
being real is precisely that we are fated in the long run to believe that it is,
that the belief that it is real—where the “it” may be something as large as “an
ideal moral order”—exhibits “coerciveness over thought.”
Nor did Peirce himself fail to appreciate the measure of both agreement
and disagreement. Hence the curiously grudging tone of the following:
In the first place, there is the definition of James, whose definition differs
from mine only in that he does not restrict the “meaning,” that is the ultimate
logical interpretant, as I do, to a habit, but allows percepts, that is, complex
feelings endowed with compulsiveness, to be such. If he is willing to do this,
I do not quite see how he need give any room at all to habit. But practically,
5. Ibid., 21–22.

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his view and mine must, I think, coincide, except where he allows consider-
ations not at all pragmatic to have weight.6
Peirce refers to James’s interpretation of the pragmatic maxim and the reser-
vation is occasioned by the fact that James allows “[an idea’s] intensity, its
seriousness—its interest, in a word” to have weight.7 It is true that on Peirce’s
view interests also have a role in determining the truth. For Peirce himself
writes that the ultimate aim of inquiry is a finished knowledge, which we are
to approach in the limit but never actually achieve and which will have an
“aesthetic quality” that will be a “free development of the agent’s own aes-
thetic quality” and will, at the same time, match the “aesthetic quality” of
“the ultimate action of experience upon him.”8 However, Peirce supposes
that all rational inquirers will share this “ultimate aim,” while James believes
that more practical and more immediate aims and sentiments must also play
a role in determining what the “ultimate consensus” will be.
Moreover, the sense in which Peirce and James think of our “interests” or
our “ultimate aim” as determining truth is complex. For both James and
Peirce truth is a property of beliefs or judgments, and without thinkers there
are no beliefs to be true or false. In that sense, both Peirce and James can
agree that being interested in having true beliefs determines whether there
will be truth. Moreover, our various interests determine what inquiries we
shall pursue, what concepts we will find useful, and so on; that is, they de-
termine which truths there will be. But James is willing to draw radical con-
sequences from this last idea, consequences Peirce is not willing to draw
because of his scholastic realism, his belief that ultimately only those con-
cepts survive that correspond to real Thirds.9 The element in James’s thought
6. Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:494. Peirce may also be thinking of “The Pragmatic
Method” in James, Essays in Philosophy, in Works, 5:123–139. There James writes, “I
think myself that [the principle of pragmatism] should be expressed more broadly
than Mr. Peirce expresses it. The ultimate test for us of what truth means is indeed the
conduct it dictates or inspires. But it inspires that conduct because it first foretells
some particular turn to our experience which shall call for just that conduct” (124).
7. James’s statement of the pragmatic maxim is found in Pragmatism, in Works,
1:28–29.
9. For a discussion of Thirdness see Chapter 8 of this volume.

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that Peirce objected to is clearly expressed in “The Sentiment of Rationality.”

There James writes
of two conceptions equally fit to satisfy the logical demand, that one which
awakens the active impulses, or satisfies other aesthetic demands better than
the other, will be accounted the more rational conception, and will deservedly
prevail. . . .
A thorough-going interpretation of the world in terms of mechanical se-
quence is compatible with its being interpreted teleologically, for the mecha-
nism itself may be designed.
If, then, there were several systems excogitated, equally satisfying to our
purely logical needs, they would still have to be passed in review, and ap-
proved or rejected by our aesthetic and practical nature.10
But the disagreement—and it is very important—over just this claim of

James’s should not obscure the fact that James, like Peirce, declares his alle-
giance to a notion of truth defined in terms of ultimate consensus.
But, one might object, the reason that the community of inquirers will
agree on a certain opinion in the long run is that the opinion is true.
“Consensus theory of truth” suggests the reverse, that the opinion to which
the community of inquirers will agree in the long run is true because they
agree on it. Surely neither Peirce nor James would say that! The answer is
that it is virtually a conceptual truth for both Peirce and James that the long-
run opinion of those who inquire, the opinion that they are “fated” to hold,
is the true one. This is their constitutive account of truth. But neither James
nor Peirce thinks that the community of inquirers can simply decide what
the long-run opinion is to be; both stress how tightly we are coerced by both
reality and the body of previous belief.
Any comparison of James with Peirce must face two difficult exegetical
questions, however. (1) Although Peirce in places does speak of “the opinion
which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate,” he later
glosses this as the opinion which we would converge to if inquiry were indef-
initely continued.11 Would James accept a similar modification? And (2)
Peirce insists that the convergence to the final opinion which is formulated


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by a true belief be determined by an “external permanency” (he also writes

“by nothing human”). Would James agree? With respect to the first ques-
tion, I shall argue that James is talking about an ultimate convergence to be
actually, not just counterfactually, brought about. But I shall postpone this
discussion until we have examined what James says about truth in Pragmatism.
The second question is somewhat easier. Contrary to some misreaders,
James does insist that a truth must put us in (“fruitful”) contact with a reali-
ty.12 This strain in James’s thought is termed (by him) his “epistemological
realism,” and Perry admits that his famous work “largely ignores” it.13 Early
and late James speaks of “agreement” with reality and even (as in the passage
quoted above) of “correspondence” (although he also insists that correspon-
dence is a notion that must be explained, not one that can simply function
as the explanation of the notion of truth).14 However, James also thinks that
what kinds of contact with realities will count as “fruitful” depend on our
“aesthetic and practical nature.” Thus James rejects both the view that agree-
ment with reality is not required for truth and the Peircean view that our
convergence to certain beliefs will be forced on us “by nothing human.”
While these differences from Peirce are certainly momentous, the points
of agreement should not be missed. They share the idea of truth as a final
opinion to be converged to and determined (although not, in James’s case,
exclusively determined) by reality. The 1878 formulation of what I shall call
“James’s ultimate consensus theory of truth” that I quoted earlier and the
discussion of the objectivity of moral value in “The Sentiment of Rationality”
(1879) were written long before James arrived at his metaphysics of radical
empiricism, which was first published in a series of eleven articles that ap-
peared in 1903–1904. (These essays, plus one other, were posthumously
published as Essays in Radical Empiricism.) In “The Will to Believe” (1896)
truth is also defined as “the total drift of thinking.”15 By 1906, however, the
metaphysics of radical empiricism was worked out to his satisfaction, as was
his answer to Royce’s claim that pragmatism cannot account for reference to
objects outside the mind, and the complex architecture of Pragmatism re-
flects the fact that James was now working from within a rich framework of

13. Perry, Thought and Character, 2:591.

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metaphysical ideas.16 Particularly relevant is the fact that James now distin-
guishes between “half-truths”—the statements we accept at a given time as
our best posits—and “absolute truths.” The passage in which the distinction
is drawn is difficult to interpret—I shall examine it closely in the course of
this essay—but as James later explains it in The Meaning of Truth, the claim
is that we do attain absolute truth, although we can never guarantee that we
do; and James posits that pragmatism itself is absolutely true. In The Meaning
of Truth, absolute truth is characterized by James as membership in an “ideal
set” of “formulations” on which there will be “ultimate consensus”—yet an-
other Peircean formulation.17
2. James on “Agreement with Reality”
Pragmatism is deliberately popular in style, so much so that both Royce (who

disagreed with James) and Bergson (who largely agreed) hinted that it might
be misunderstood.18 The lectures which it contains describe pragmatism as a
“method” in philosophy, and also more narrowly as “a theory of truth,” yet
there is nothing one could call a “definition of truth.” James’s response to
Russell, who read James as attempting to give a necessary and sufficient con-
dition for truth, beautifully characterizes the essence of Russell’s approach as
well as illustrating James’s own style of thought:
A mathematical term, such as a, b, c, x, y, sin, log, is self-sufficient, and terms

of this sort, once equated, can be substituted for one another in endless series
without error. Mr. Russell . . . seem(s) to think that in our mouth also such
terms as “meaning,” “truth,” “belief,” “object,” “definition” are self-sufficients
16. See Josiah Royce, The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, 2 vols., ed. John J.
McDermott (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 1969), 321–325; this should be
read in the light of 681–709.
17. James, The Meaning of Truth, in Works, 2:143–144. It is true that the reference
to “fate” is absent. But Peirce himself rather downplays this notion, writing in a foot-
note to the definition cited, “Fate means merely that which is sure to come true. . . .
We are all fated to die.”
18. Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Josiah Royce, ed. John Roth (New York: Thomas
Crowell, 1971), 511; Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1983), 107.

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with no context of varying relations that might be further asked about. What
a word means is expressed by its definition, isn’t it? The definition claims to be
exact and adequate, doesn’t it? Then it can be substituted for the word—since
the two are identical—can’t it? Then two words with the same definition can
be substituted for one another, n’est-ce pas? Likewise two definitions of the
same word, nicht wahr, etc., till it will be indeed strange if you can’t convict
someone of self-contradiction and absurdity.19
Instead of offering a rigorous definition of truth of this kind, the discussion

in Pragmatism proceeds by means of a number of examples.
In Pragmatism two ideas are stressed: (1) truth is agreement with a reality
or realities, and (2) “truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by
events.”20
James begins his discussion by asking what “agreement” and “reality”
mean, in the dictionary definition, when applied to the statement that a true
idea is one that “agrees” with reality. James writes:
In answering these questions, the pragmatists are more analytic and painstak-
ing, the intellectualists more offhand and irreflective. The popular notion is
that a true idea must copy its reality. Like other popular views, this one fol-
lows the analogy of the most usual experience. Our true ideas of sensible
things do indeed copy them.21
Shut your eyes, and think of yonder clock on the wall, and you get such a
true picture or copy of its dial. But your idea of its works, unless you are a
clockmaker, is much less of a copy, and yet it passes muster. . . . Even though
it [your idea of the works] should shrink to the mere word “works,” that word
still serves you truly. And when you speak of the “timekeeping function” of
the clock, or of its spring’s “elasticity,” it is hard to see exactly what your ideas
can copy. 22
Here we have the idea of a range of cases of which copying is simply one
extreme. The idea that it is empty to think of reference as one relation is also

21. As we shall see, this does not mean that resemblance is ever sufficient for refer-
ence.
22. Ibid., 96.

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a central insight of Wittgenstein’s, but, without slighting Wittgenstein, one

must point out that James already said that here.
James also says something about verification here: True ideas are those that
we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we
cannot. But James at once points out that that “general statement” is itself
vague: “But what do the words verification and validation themselves signify?
They again signify certain practical consequences of the verified and validated
idea. It is hard to find any one phrase that characterizes these consequences
better than the ordinary agreement formula—just such consequences being
what we have in mind when we say that our ideas ‘agree’ with reality. . . . Such
an account is vague and it sounds at first quite trivial, but it has consequences
which it will take the rest of my hour to explain.”23 I will examine this lecture
(“Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth”) more closely in Section 3. But first I
want to look at a passage in Essays in Radical Empiricism, where the point that
there is not one single relation between an idea (any idea) and what it is about
is elaborated with the aid of the metaphysics of radical empiricism:
Suppose me to be sitting here in my library at Cambridge, at ten minutes’

walk from “Memorial Hall,” and to be thinking truly of the latter object. My
mind may have before it only the name, or it may have a clear image, or it
may have a very dim image of the hall, but such an intrinsic difference in the
image makes no difference to its cognitive function. Certain extrinsic phe-
nomena, special experiences of conjunction, are what impart to the image, be
it what it may, its knowing office.
For instance, if you ask me what hall I mean by my image, and I can tell
you nothing; or if I fail to point, or lead you towards the Harvard Delta; or if
being led by you I am uncertain whether the hall I see be what I had in mind
or not; you would rightly deny that I had “meant” that particular hall at all,
even though my mental image might to some degree have resembled it. The
resemblance would count in that case as coincidental merely. For all sorts of
things of a kind resemble one another in this world, without being held for
that reason to take cognizance of one another.24
In short, mere resemblance never suffices for truth. It is what we do with our
“images” that makes the difference. “If I can lead you to the hall, and tell you
23. Ibid., 98.


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of its history and present uses, if in its presence I feel my idea, however im-
perfect it may have been, to have led hither, and to be now terminated; if the
associates of the image and of the felt hall run parallel, so each term of the
one corresponds serially as I walk with an answering term of the other; why
then my soul was prophetic and my idea must be, and by common consent
would be, called cognizant of reality. The percept was what I meant, for into
it my idea has passed by conjunctive experiences of sameness and fulfilled
intention. Nowhere is there a jar, but every moment continues and corrob-
orates an earlier one.”25
These remarks on the ways ideas correspond to reality presuppose the
notion of “conjunctive experiences.” (James also speaks of “conjunctive rela-
tions,” but, according to radical empiricism, relations too are directly expe-
rienced.) The most striking aspect of James’s radical empiricism is its inten-
tion to be close to “natural realism.”26 In perception I am directly acquainted
with external reality—indeed, to speak of my “sensations” and to speak of
the external realities the sensations are “of “ is to speak of the same bits of
“pure experience,” counted “twice over” (with two different “contexts”). I
have argued that James was the first post-Cartesian philosopher to com-
pletely reject the idea that perception requires intermediaries.27 However,
James subscribed to the slogan esse est percipi. Since one is directly acquainted
with reality, impressions are not simply in the mind, and since esse est percipi,
then all there is are these impressions that are not simply in the mind. No
doubt, that is why James does not call them “impressions” but “pure experi-
ence.” Reality just is the flux of “pure experience.”
In addition, James held that concepts always “build out” the bits of pure
experience they describe. For that reason, direct acquaintance is not infallible.28
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 63.
27. See Hilary Putnam, “James’s Theory of Perception,” in Realism with a Human
Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), and “Sense, Nonsense, and
the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human Mind” (Dewey Lectures, 1994),
The Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 9 (September 1994): 445–517.
28. The mutability of knowledge is a constant theme (see, for example, James,
Pragmatism, in Works, 1:107 and Lecture 5). Pure experience in itself is neither true nor
false, but any conceptualization of it is fallible. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, in
Works, 3:28–29.

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Even if I see something that looks just like a clock’s face, it may turn out that
my belief is mistaken—I may be looking at a trompe l’oeil painting. Nevertheless,
a vital part—if never all—of the “agreement with reality” that James speaks of
is verification by direct acquaintance with external realities; and James lashes
out at his critics for ignoring this.29 Speaking to what he calls the “fourth mis-
understanding” of pragmatism (“No pragmatist can be a realist in his episte-
mology”), he writes, “The pragmatist calls satisfactions indispensible for
truth-building, but I have everywhere called them insufficient unless reality be
also incidentally led to. . . . Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless
some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatist I
have so carefully postulated ‘reality’ ab intitio, and why, throughout my whole
discussion, I remain an epistemological realist.”30
Ideas which have not yet been verified may also agree with reality. As we
have just seen, James takes the relevant relation(s) to be “conjunctive rela-
tions”; and as we said, such relations are given in experience.31 The relevant
relations are precisely the ones that constitute verifications. The idea that
there are elm trees in a certain forest may, for example, be “directly verified”
in the future by going to the forest and seeing the elm trees. The fact that the
idea “led me” to the elm trees and “terminated in” that direct acquaintance
of the elm trees constitutes its “agreement” with the elm trees.
An idea that was never directly verified may also agree with a reality by
“substituting” for it; for example, the belief that the couch in my office was
there at 3 am last Sunday morning leads to as successful a prediction as if I
had directly verified it.32 Compare this with the statement “Truth lives for
the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass’, so long as
nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses
them. But this all points to direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, with-
out which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash
basis whatever.”33 Summing up all these sorts of “agreement,” James writes
that “to ‘agree’ in the widest sense with a reality can only mean to be guided
straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such working touch

30. Ibid., 106.
31. These are relations which we perceive as similarities or at least as connections.

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with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we had

disagreed. Better either intellectually or practically!.”34 This account of “agree-
ment” led James to link truth to verificatory experiences, and it is necessary
to see why James felt constrained to adopt it.
James was a direct realist about perception, but not about conception.
The relation of our concepts to whatever they are said to “agree with” or
“refer to” can only be a matter of external relations, according to James.
“The pointing of our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely as a
procession of mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the
thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed out, into some
ideal or real context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers
themselves.”35 Philosophers who think that our ideas possess intrinsic in-
tentionality, he insists, are simply wrong. In the same passage, he even
makes the significant slip of equating “our ideas” with mental images:
“There is no self-transcendency in our mental images taken by themselves.”
(Recall his claim that in the absence of “mirrored matter” ideas are just “flat
psychological surface.”) Thus, it is the search for external relations that consti-
tute reference that leads James to seek particular “conjunctive relations” that
can be observed to connect our ideas with what they are about.
But this is not the only possible way to think of conception. Philosophers—
and I am one of them—who reject what I have called the “interface concep-
tion of conception” agree that conception frequently involves words and
images.36 But we insist that the words and images which we use in thought
are not “flat psychological surface” to which an interpretation has to be
added. Words in use are not mere noises, and mental images are profoundly
unlike physical images. But the issues are deep, and I do not have space to
pursue them here.
To round out my account of James’s notion of “agreement with reality,” I
shall instead make two further remarks:
34. Ibid., 102.

36. In recent years we have been urged to think of conceptions as capacities for
representing rather than as representations by John McDowell. “Mind and Meaning,”
Philosophical Topics 20 (1992): 35–48; see also John Haldane, “Putnam on
Intentionality,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 671–682; and
Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense and the Senses.”

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1. James recognizes that not all of our concepts refer to sensible realities.
Unlike the positivists, James was willing to count the objects of “nonpercep-
tual experiences,” if their existence should be confirmed, as on an ontologi-
cal par with the things we can observe by means of the senses.37 For example,
mathematical notions, ethical notions, and religious notions are not subject
to verification either by direct experience or by means of scientific experi-
ments; and James is content to offer separate accounts in each case, without
pretending to a single overarching theory of all possible sorts of “agreement
with reality.” In the case of ethics and religion, James’s account is itself plu-
ralistic.38 In the case of religion, James finds a partial, but very imperfect,
analogy between religious experience and observation—but there are also
purely intellectual factors, and there are ethical requirements, including a
need for a picture of the universe that we find sympathetic.39 The need for
trade-offs, if we are ever to find a satisfactory religious world-picture, is the
subject of James’s A Pluralistic Universe. In the case of ethics, there is a utili-
tarian moment, represented by the idea that we must try to satisfy as many
“demands” as possible; but there is also an anti-utilitarian moment, repre-
sented by the rejection of the idea that there is any single scale on which
demands can be compared. The overriding ideal is to discover “more inclu-
sive ideals.”40 (Here James is at his most “pluralistic.”)
2. Verification is a holistic matter, and many factors are involved, success
in prediction being only one. Among the other factors that James mentions are
conservation of past doctrine, simplicity, and coherence with “what fits every
part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands,
nothing being omitted.”41 James describes the fluidity of this holistic verifica-
tion when he writes, “New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of
transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as to show a minimum of jolt,
a maximum of continuity. We hold a theory true just in proportion to its suc-
cess at solving this problem of ‘maxima and minima.’ But success in solving
37. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, in Works, 3:10.

38. James’s account of mathematics is in the empiricist tradition. Mathematics
deals with internal relations among our ideas which are themselves directly observable
by us. I do not think that this account is tenable.
39. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in Works, vol. 13.
40. See Chapter 7 (“Reflections on the Future of Pragmatism”) of this volume.
41. James, Pragmatism, in Works, 1:36, 44, 83.

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this problem is eminently a problem of approximation. We say this theory

solves it on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that means
more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of
satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plas-
tic.”42 This plasticity provides the space for practical interests to cast their vote,
in the way James had in mind when he wrote in the passage from “The
Sentiment of Rationality” I quoted earlier “of two conceptions equally fit to
satisfy the logical demand, that one which awakens the active impulses, or
satisfies other aesthetic demands better than the other, will be accounted the
more rational conception, and will deservedly prevail.”43
3. “Truth Happens to an Idea”
Although James insisted that there is a close connection between verifica-

tion and truth, he vehemently denied confounding them.44 How then
should we understand the statement that “truth happens to an idea. It
becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process:
the process namely of its verifying itself, its verification”?45 It is wrong to
take this as a conflation of truth with verification, for the following
reasons:
1. When beliefs are “made true” by the process of verification, they are
made true retroactively. As James himself puts it:
Ptolemaic astronomy, euclidean space, aristotelian logic, scholastic meta-

physics, were expedient for centuries, but human experience has now
boiled over those limits, and we call those things only relatively true, or
true within those borders of experience. “Absolutely” they are false; for we
know that those limits were casual, and might have been transcended by
past theorists just as they are by present thinkers. When new experiences
lead to retrospective judgments, using the past tense, what these judg-
ments utter was true, even tho no past thinker had been led there.46
42. Ibid., 3, 5.
46. Ibid., 107.

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2. Although any particular verification terminates at a time, “the process

namely of [an idea’s] verifying itself ” is endless. “Experience, as we know, has
ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas,” he writes.47
What we refer to as “verified” claims are “true within those borders of expe-
rience”—the experience that we count as having verified them—but whether
they are “absolutely” true only future experience can decide. James clearly
recognized that “confirmed” is a tensed predicate whereas “true” is tenseless
and recognized as well that a statement which is verified (in the sense of
being confirmed) may later turn out to be false.
As we saw, James accepted the formula “truth is agreement with real-
ity”—provided that formula is properly understood. His metaphysical com-
mitments caused him to identify the “agreement” in question with some ac-
tually observable “conjunctive relation(s),” and the only ones James could find
are the ones involved in verification processes. So James came to the conclu-
sion that beliefs do not (unobservably) “agree with reality” independently of
whether they are verified, but rather come to agree with reality as the conjunc-
tive relations in question come into existence. Hence the doctrine that “truth
happens to an idea!”
But since reality has ways of making us correct our present formulas, it
can only be the entire process of verification in the long run that “makes” an
idea true. All the elements of James’s theory of truth—the Peircean compo-
nent, the idea that our practical interests play a role, James’s conception of
“agreement,” and the notion that truth “happens” to an idea—have to be
kept in mind when one is interpreting any single statement in James’s com-
plex text.
I pointed out in Section 1 that, although Peirce does speak of “the opinion
which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate,” he later
glosses this as the opinion which we would converge to if inquiry were indef-
initely continued, and I asked if James would accept a similar modification.
The answer is that he would not. For in Peirce’s view, the counterfactual “If
investigation had been indefinitely prolonged, such-and-such a statement
would have been verified” might be true even though no actually experienced
fact supports that counterfactual. A statement may “agree” with reality al-
though the “conjunctive relation” which constitutes that agreement exists
47. Ibid., 106.

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only as a counterfactual possibility and not as a “conjunctive experience.”

Truth does not have to “happen” for an idea to be true; it only has to be the
case that “it would have happened if.” James’s metaphysics has no place for
such a claim. But James does not object to counterfactuals as such. Many
counterfactuals actually get verified. But those counterfactuals have had
truth “happen” to them; they are not made true by a mysterious kind of
potentiality (“Thirdness”) but by the “cash-value” of incorporating them in
our system of beliefs. Peirce would reply that this insistence on actual bits of
“pure experience” as the sole constituents of reality is a form of “nominal-
ism,” and that nominalism is a profound philosophical error. My concern is
not to decide the issue between these two great pragmatists but to bring out
the enormous difference in their underlying metaphysical assumptions.
James “radical empiricism” has no room for Peirce’s “Thirdness.”
4. Two Important (and Difficult) Passages in Pragmatism

and The Meaning of Truth
Misreadings of James’s views on truth are almost always based upon four
paragraphs in Pragmatism. Let me quote them in full:
“The true,” to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking,
just as “the right” is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in
almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole of course;
for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won’t necessarily meet
all farther experiences equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways
of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
The “absolutely” true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is
that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary
truths will some day converge. It runs on all fours with the perfectly wise man,
and with the absolutely complete experience; and if these ideals are ever realized,
they will all be realized together. Meanwhile, we have to live today by what truth
we can get today, and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood. Ptolemaic astron-
omy, euclidean space, aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics, were expedient
for centuries, but human experience has now boiled over those limits, and we
call those things only relatively true, or true within those borders of experience.
“Absolutely” they are false; for we know that those limits were casual, and might
have been transcended by past theorists just as they are by present thinkers.

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When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past

tense, what these judgments utter was true, even tho no past thinker had been
led there. We live forward, a Danish thinker has said, but we understand
backwards. The present sheds a backward light on the world’s previous pro-
cesses. They may have been truth-processes for the actors in them. They are
not so for one who knows the later revelations of the story.
This regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established later, pos-
sibly to be established absolutely, and having powers of retroactive legislation,
turns its face, like all pragmatist notions, towards concreteness of fact, and to-
wards the future. Like the half-truths, the absolute truth will have to be made,
made as a relation incidental to the growth of a mass of verification experience,
to which the half-true ideas are all along contributing their quota.48
Critics typically cite only the first sentence. Such readers attend only to the
idea that “expedience” is what determines truth, although most of this lec-
ture (i.e., Pragmatism, Lecture 6) is devoted to “agreement” with realities.
Thus, Russell quotes James as follows: “The ‘true’ is only expedient in the
way of our thinking . . . in the long run and on the whole of course.” Russell
omits “to put it very briefly” and “in almost any fashion”—indications that
what we have is a thematic statement, and not an attempt to formulate a
definition of “true”—and also substitutes his own notion of what “expedi-
ency” is for James’s, and ends up saying that James proposed the theory that
“true” means “has good effects.”
In The Meaning of Truth, James complains of an additional misunder-
standing: it consists in accusing “the pragmatists” of denying that we can
speak of any such thing as “absolute” truth.49 Perhaps such readers take the
remark about “the perfectly wise man” to be mocking absolute truth. But
what James is telling us is that, while it is true that we will never reach the
whole ideal set of formulations that constitutes absolute truth, “we imagine
that all of our temporary truths” will converge to that ideal limit. In his reply
to this misinterpretation, James says as much:
I expect that the more fully men discuss and test my account, the more they
will agree that it fits, and the less they will desire a change. I may, of course, be
48. Ibid., 106–107.


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premature, and the glory of being truth final and absolute may fall upon some
later revision and correction of my scheme, which will then be judged untrue
in just the measure in which it departs from that final satisfactory formula-
tion. To admit, as we pragmatists do, that we are liable to correction (even tho
we may not expect it) involves the use on our part of an ideal standard.50
On the next pages James is even more explicit:
Truth absolute, [the pragmatist] says, means an ideal set of formulations

towards which all opinions may in the long run of experience be expected
to converge. In this definition of absolute truth he not only postulates that
there is a tendency to such convergence of opinion, to such absolute consen-
sus, but he postulates the other factors of his definition equally, borrowing
them by anticipation from the true conclusions expected to be reached. He
postulates the existence of opinions, he postulates the experience that will
sift them, and the consistency which that experience will show. He justifies
himself in these assumptions by saying that they are not postulates in the
strict sense but simple inductions from the past extended to the future by
analogy; and he insists that human opinion has already reached a pretty
stable equilibrium regarding them, and that if its future development fails
to alter them, the definition itself, with all its terms included, will be part of
the very absolute truth which it defines. The hypothesis will, in short, have
worked successfully all around the circle and proved self-corroborative, and
the circle will be closed.51
It might be objected, however, that what James is doing here is giving a

pragmatist definition of “absolute truth” (in order to reply to those who
think that a pragmatist can have no such concept), and that he has quite a
different theory of “truth” tout court.52 The latter, it might be claimed, just is
being verified. But such a reading, in addition to ignoring the characteriza-
tion of truth as “the total drift of thought,” “the fate of thought,” and “the
entire drift of experience” in James’s earlier writings, does not fit the para-
graphs just quoted. What is verified is not called “true,” but only “half-
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 143–144.
52. This objection was suggested by David Lamberth.

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true.”53 And when James writes of such now-refuted doctrines as Euclidean

geometry, he writes that “we call these only relatively true, or true within
those borders of experience.”
Moreover, in the very next sentence, James adds, “‘Absolutely’ they are
false”—and immediately goes on to write of our newer judgments about
these matters that “what these judgments utter was true,” without any use of
the qualifier “absolutely.” James quite freely equates “true” and “absolutely
true”; it is “half-true” that always takes the qualifier.
5. A Few Comments on James’s Theory of Truth
One can, I believe, learn a great deal from James. He was the first modern
philosopher successfully to reject the idea that our impressions are located in
a private mental theater (and thus constitute an interface between ourselves
and “the external world”), although one does not have to accept James’s
whole metaphysics of “pure experience” to follow him here.54 James empha-
sized the ways in which verification and valuation are interdependent, with-
out drawing relativist or subjectivist conclusions, and we should do the
same. James taught us to see concepts as instruments which serve many
different interests. But James’s theory of truth is seriously flawed. I will men-
tion just one objection—a fatal one—jotted down by Royce on a copy of
53. Speaking of the propositions “this is a moral universe,” “this is an unmoral

universe”—for James, these are fundamental moral/religious propositions—James
writes, “It cannot be said that the question ‘Is this a moral world?’ is a meaningless and
unverifiable question because it deals with something non-phenomenal. . . . The veri-
fication of the theory which you may hold as to the objectively moral character of the
world can consist only in this—that if you proceed to act upon your theory it will be
reversed by nothing that will later turn up as that action’s fruit; it will harmonize so
well with the entire drift of experience that the latter will, as it were, adopt it, or at
most give it an ampler interpretation, without obliging you in any way to change the
essence of its formulation.” “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in The Will to Believe, in
Works, 6:86 (emphasis added).
54. Thomas Reid and Peirce also opposed it, but, in my view, not successfully; see
Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses,” 468n10.

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James’s leaflet “The Meaning of the Word Truth.”55 The objection is that, on
James’s account, for a statement about the past to be true it is necessary that
the statement be believed in the future and that it become “the total drift of
thought.” In this way, the truth-value of every statement about the past de-
pends on what happens in the future—and that cannot be right.
James was aware of the possibility of some such objection, and Perry gives
us his answer.56 What James says is simply that there is a difference between
past realities, which cannot be changed, and truths about the past, which are
“mutable.” Presumably he meant that it is judgments that are true or false
(James—reasonably, in my view—would never so much as entertain the
Fregean alternative of conceiving of thoughts as entities which exist inde-
pendently of thinkers); truths do not exist until some thinker actually thinks
them. But his claim that the past is immutable (considered as a “reality” and
not as a “judgment”) is still in tension with his theory, as we may see by
considering a contested historical judgment, say, that Lizzie Borden com-
mitted the famous axe murders. Many believe she was guilty; so the judg-
ment that she was exists, and (since she was acquitted) the judgment that she
was innocent was at least entertained as a reasonable possibility. If the im-
mutability of the past means that it is a “reality” that Lizzie Borden commit-
ted the murders or a “reality” that she did not, independently of whether one
or the other of these judgments is ever confirmed, then, if she committed the
murders but the judgment that she did never becomes “coercive over
thought,” on James’s theory of truth it will follow that Lizzie Borden com-
mitted the murders, but the judgment that she did is not true—contradict-
ing the principle that, for any judgment p, p is equivalent to the judgment
that p is true. And similarly if she did not commit the murders, but the
judgment that she did not never becomes “coercive over thought,” we will
have a violation of the same principle.
James might reply that the reality is immutable, but what is true of the
reality is not; but this would totally undercut the reply (the letter to Lane)
that Perry reprints. What led James into this cul-de-sac was his failure to
challenge traditional views of conception. James decisively rejected the inter-
55. Royce’s notes may be found in Perry, Thought and Character, 2:735–736. The
leaflet is reprinted in James, The Meaning of Truth, in Works, 2:117–119.
56. See the letter to Alfred C. Lane, reprinted in Perry, Thought and Character,
2:477–478.

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face conception of perception. And at one point he even seems prepared to

give a parallel account of conception, but this was not followed up.57 Instead,
in Pragmatism and in The Meaning of Truth he returned to treating thoughts
and ideas as mental shapes, “flat psychological surface,” which require exter-
nal relations to connect them to public objects. As we saw, James picked
various relations to do the connecting—for example, “leading to” and “sub-
stituting for.” An idea may lead me to the reality it refers to, or it may sub-
stitute for it in the sense that belief in it works as well as if we had perceived
the reality in question.
It is easy to see how the problem with the truth of our beliefs about the
past results. My ideas cannot “lead me” to past things and events; they are
gone. The only way in which an “idea,” postulated to be “loose and separate”
from what it refers to, can “refer” to the past things and events is by “substi-
tuting” for them.58 But this is just to say that an idea of past events is true if
it works now and in the future! (“Works” in the sense(s) appropriate to the
“verification process,” of course.) This is the way in which James’s failure to
be as radical in his account of conception as he was willing to be in his ac-
count of perception led him to a disastrous theory.
I believe that much of what James wanted to deny should be denied. It is
right that we do not have to think of truth as presupposing a mysterious “rela-
tion of agreement with reality”—one and the same relation in all cases—or an
infinite mind able to overcome the limitations of all limited and finite points
of view (as in absolute idealism) or some other piece of transcendental ma-
chinery, something metaphysical beneath our practice of making and criticiz-
ing truth claims, which makes that practice possible. James’s Pragmatism is at
its most powerful when it argues just this, and at its least successful when it
tries to find the “external relations” which make reference and truth possible.
Note
I am very much indebted to Ruth Anna Putnam for close reading and help-
ful criticism of an earlier draft.


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12
James on Truth (Again)
Hilary Putnam
I BEGIN WITH a confession. This chapter is hung onto the subject of James’s
Varieties by what may seem as the very thinnest of threads, a single sentence
in the Varieties, but when you hear that sentence, I think that you will agree
that it deserves meditating on. The sentence in question reads as follows:
The word ‘truth’ is taken to mean something additional to bare value for life,
although the natural propensity of man is to believe that whatever has value
for life is thereby certified as true.1
The reason that this footnote invites meditation is twofold. First, it is di-
rectly connected in the text with the following pair of questions that James
introduced a few pages earlier:
First, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common nucleus to
which they bear their testimony unanimously? And second, ought we to con-
sider the testimony true?2
In fact, the paragraph to which this footnote is appended reads as follows:
So far, however, as this analysis goes [James’s analysis of the “common nu-
cleus” to which the religious experiences that the varieties has examined ‘bear
1. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in Works, 13:401n23.

2. Ibid., 399.

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JAMES ON TRUTH (AGAIN) 189
their testimony’], the experiences are only psychological phenomena. They

possess, it is true, enormous biological worth. Spiritual strength really in-
creases in the subject when he has them, a new life opens for him, and they
seem to him a place of conflux where the forces of two universes meet; and yet
this may be nothing but his subjective way of feeling things, a mood of his
own fancy, in spite of the effects produced. I now turn to my second question:
What is the objective ‘truth’ of their content?3
And precisely here James tells us that the word ‘truth’ is taken to mean
something additional to “bare value for life.”
Thus the whole question as to how we are to understand the sense in which
James believes that there might be some objective truth to what he calls the
“common nucleus” to which the various creeds bear testimony depends for its
answer on how we ought to interpret this footnote. And second, as you all
know, James has been almost universally accused of identifying truth with
“value for life.” Of course, careful readers have pointed out that it is not value
for life merely in the case of the individual believer but value for life “in the long
run and on the whole, of course” that James speaks of, but that truth cannot go
beyond value for life on the whole and in the long run is agreed upon, or better,
simply assumed as a given, by the great majority of writers who refer to James’s
views on the subject.4 So how, and at this crucial juncture, can he speak of
“something additional” to “bare” value for life being required for truth?
This is a crucial question. If we think that when James asks whether the
“common nucleus” of the various religious “creeds” is true, all he means by
truth is “value for life,” then we will have taken him to have answered the
question of truth when he pointed out the “enormous biological worth” and
the “spiritual value” of that nucleus. If we go in that direction, then we will
see this footnote as something to be explained away, or (and perhaps this is
the more usual treatment) simply ignored. If, on the other hand, we take the
footnote seriously, and look for an understanding of James’s philosophy on
which he is entitled to say that, in his view, although value for life is necessary
for truth, it is not sufficient for truth, then that will require us to see James’s
view of truth as applied to religious belief as a more ‘realist’ one. And this is,
I want to argue, what we should do and how we should see James’s view.
3. Ibid., 401.

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The history of the treatment of the realist strain in James’s philosophy

overall is somewhat strange. Perry, James’s first great biographer and exposi-
tor, writes rather late in the second volume of his famous study, “Another
element of James’s philosophy which is largely ignored in this work is his real-
ism,” and this may have encouraged other readers, less familiar with James’s
work than Perry, to feel they could safely ignore it as well.5 Yet when James
replied to a number of “misunderstandings” of pragmatism in The Meaning
of Truth, he had listed the idea that “no pragmatist can be a realist in his
epistemology” as the fourth misunderstanding, and in explaining why this is
a misunderstanding, he wrote:
The pragmatist calls satisfactions indispensable for truth-building, but I have

everywhere called them insufficient unless reality also be incidentally led to.
. . . Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter
gives them cognitive luster. That is why as a pragmatist I have so carefully
postulated ‘reality’ ab initio, and why, throughout my whole discussion, I re-
main an epistemological realist.6
Moreover, a central point of James’s metaphysics of pure experience is to

reject root and branch the idea of a ‘veil of perception’, the idea that we ‘di-
rectly perceive’ only our own sense data and are never in immediate percep-
tual contact with reality.7 As Lamberth, Sprigge, myself, and others have
pointed out, it is precisely because ideas can “lead to” and “terminate in”
pure experiences that talk of ideas being about reality, “agreeing with” reality,
makes sense, according to James, and it is because pure experience is in prin-
5. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 2:591 (emphasis added).
6. James, The Meaning of Truth, in Works, 2:106 (emphasis added).
7. Nor is this a particularly recent or novel interpretation of James. It is often over-
looked that Bertrand Russell, although he attacked James’s theory of truth, was a great
admirer of precisely James’s metaphysics of pure experience. In the preface to The
Analysis of Mind (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921), Russell writes, “The view
that seems to me to reconcile the materialistic tendency of psychology with the anti-
materialistic tendency of physics is the view of William James and the American new
realists, according to which the ‘stuff’ of the world is neither mental nor physical, but
‘neutral’ stuff, out of which the world is constructed” (6). And he describes his book
as an attempt to “develop the view in some detail.”

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ciple public and not private that ideas can refer to a public, intersubjective
reality. Indeed, James insists in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”
that “truth supposes a standard outside the thinker to which he must con-
form.”8
Our question, then, in brief, is simply what entitles James to speak of
truth as requiring “something additional to bare value for life,” given that he
has so often been read in such a way that the very idea of a constituent of
truth additional to value for life is supposed to be meaningless to a Jamesian
pragmatist? In answering this question, I shall have to refer at a certain point
to my own published interpretation of James’s theory of truth, which I know
has been contested by David Lamberth, and there may well be other scholars
who have interpretations of James on truth different from my own, but I
shall begin by making some points that I hope will be accepted by all of us
who have written on these issues.9
I already quoted James’s statement in The Meaning of Truth that the “prag-
matist calls satisfactions indispensable for truth-building, but I have every-
where called them insufficient unless reality also be incidentally led to.” In
the same essay he insists that a truth must put us in “fruitful” contact with a
reality. The most charming explanation that James gives of how he can hold
that truth involves not one but two elements—that is, satisfaction of human
interests and contact with reality—occurs in a letter to Dickinson Miller. I
do not claim this letter answers our interpretative questions, but, as James
wished it to do, it gives us the picture that lies behind his thought:
I am a natural realist. The world per se may be likened to a cast of beans

upon a table. By themselves they spell nothing. An onlooker may group
them as he likes. He may simply count them all and map them. He may
select groups and name these capriciously, or name them to suit certain ex-
trinsic purposes of his. Whatever he does, so long as he takes account of
them, his account is neither false nor irrelevant. If neither, why not call it
true? It fits the beans-minus-him, and expresses the total fact, of the beans-
plus-him.10

9. Chapter 11 (“James’s Theory of Truth”) of this volume.
10. James to Dickinson S. Miller, 5 August 1907, The Letters of William James, ed.

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If, with this picture to guide us, we now try to interpret the more techni-
cal accounts that James offers in many books and essays, I think the follow-
ing is a reasonable summary.
First, the ‘beans’ are bits of pure experience. Everything that exists is a
part of pure experience, and outside of pure experience there is nothing.
In particular, the ‘finite god’ (or sometimes ‘gods’) that James speaks of,
and perhaps believes in, is itself (or are themselves), just as we are, consti-
tuted of pure experience. (If this is right, then James’s rejection of a tran-
scendent deity fits well with his theory of reference. There is no possibility
of genuine reference to anything transcendent, on James’s account of ref-
erence in terms of experiences “leading to” and “terminating in” other
experiences.)
Second, the mystery as to what it would take for belief in the finite god
to be verified is at least partially removed: human religious experiences
would have to lead to and put us in fruitful contact with the finite god,
conceived of as something that communicates through and perhaps includes
my ‘subconscious’ but is something MORE than my or your or anyone’s
subconscious (I have found Sprigge’s discussions in his James and Bradley
especially helpful here).11
But might we not be mistaken in thinking that experiences had put us in
touch with (a) god? Of course, for—and this is my third point—we all know
that James is a fallibilist. Belief in God, or the finite god, may be wrong, ei-
ther because there is no reality for the belief to put us in touch with other
than “moods of [our] own fancy” (there are no beans) or because thinking of
the reality the belief puts us in touch with (assuming it does put us in touch
with a reality, a MORE, that goes beyond our own subconsciouses) as ‘god’
(or ‘gods’) does not correspond to our deepest and best interests, is not a way
to relate “fruitfully” to that reality (does not meet the interest that we have
in classifying the beans). But what does this come to in practice? What is the
criterion for either putting us in touch with a reality or for correspondence
to our deepest and best interests?
To essay an answer, I have to go beyond the points on which I said I ex-
pect us to agree. As I interpret James (and this is what David Lamberth dis-
agrees with, a criticism I address briefly in the Afterword).
11. Timothy L. S. Sprigge, James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality
(Chicago: Open Court Press, 1993).

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1. James distinguishes between mere warranted assertibility, which he in

one place calls ‘relative’ truth (and also ‘half-truth’) and tenseless, or in his
terminology, ‘absolute’, truth. (Lamberth believes that ‘absolute truth’ has
only ‘phenomenological’ significance, and no ‘metaphysical’ or ‘epistemo-
logical’ significance.)
2. James believes there are absolute truths (he tells us, for example, that
the pragmatist believes that pragmatism itself is absolutely true): “I expect
that the more fully men discuss and test my account, the more they will
agree that it fits, and the less they will desire a change,” and, as a good falli-
bilist, he adds that “I may, of course, be premature, and the glory of being
truth final and absolute may fall upon some later revision and correction of
my scheme, which will then be judged untrue in just the measure in which
it departs from that final satisfactory formulation.”12
3. James proposes a quasi-Peircean account of absolute truth: “Truth ab-
solute [the pragmatist] says, means an ideal set of formulations towards
which all opinions may in the long run of experience be expected to con-
verge.”13
The criterion for correspondence to our deepest and best interests, as well as
for the other component of truth, fruitful contact with the relevant reality,
is, then, just what James said it was in The Will to Believe, when he wrote: “It
matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to
him: he may have acquired it by fair means or foul; passion may have whis-
pered or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of thinking continues to
confirm it, that is what he means by its being true.”14
One Further Point
Before I conclude I want to consider one further question, which I did not
discuss when I wrote “James’s Theory of Truth.” That is, the question of the
status of the pragmatist’s ‘definition’ of absolute truth. We see that James is

13. Ibid., 143.
14. James, The Will to Believe, in Works, 6:24. By ‘an empiricist’ James means, of
course, a ‘radical empiricist’ in his sense.

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not claiming to be giving a semantic analysis when he mocks Russell’s style of

criticism a few pages later, writing:
What a word means is expressed by its definition, isn’t it? The definition
claims to be exact and adequate, doesn’t it? Then it can be substituted for the
word—since the two are identical—can’t it? Then two words with the same
definition can be substituted one for another, n’est ce pas? Likewise two defini-
tions of the same word, nicht wahr, etc., till it will be indeed strange if you
can’t convict someone of self-contradiction and absurdity.15
Recently I have come to think that a sentence of James which has long
puzzled me suggests not only that he is not claiming that the pragmatist’s
definition of truth is analytic, or conceptually true, or anything of that
sort, but that in fact it has the status of a hypothesis, for ‘the pragmatist’—
that is, for James himself. The sentence in question is the following: “No
pragmatist needs to dogmatize about the consensus of opinions in the fu-
ture being right. He need only postulate that it will probably contain more
of truth than anyone’s opinion now.”16 For a pragmatist a ‘postulate’ that
he is prepared to give up if experience goes against it has the status of a
hypothesis. Thus, James’s twofold requirement on truth: that a truth must
‘fit’ the appropriate realities and must also fit our interests in connection
with the particular idea or ‘formulation’, seems to me now to have a more
fundamental status in his thought than the postulate that the future ‘con-
sensus’ will be true.
To sum up, I suggest that the question of the objective truth of the “com-
mon nucleus” to which he claims the several creeds give “testimony” reduces,
for James, to a pair of questions: whether there is indeed a reality to which
the “common nucleus” refers beyond the “moods of [our] own fancy,” and,
if so, whether it is appropriate to classify that reality as ‘god’. If this isn’t
nearly as surprising or controversial or radical as some of the views that

16. Ibid., 145. Lamberth also quotes this sentence, but considers it only a commit-
ment to “trowing truth, as opposed to being content with mere verification.” By this
what Lamberth means is a commitment to further testing of presently accepted
‘truths’. David Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge:

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James gets saddled with, that is, no doubt, because James was not nearly as
nutty as some people like to pretend he was.
Afterword
It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to

him: he may have acquired it by fair means or foul; passion may have whis-
pered or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of thinking continues to
confirm it, that is what he means by its being true.17
In “James’s Theory of Truth,” I argued that James did not repudiate the
notion of ‘absolute’ truth, truth not relativized to a particular moment in
time or a particular evidential situation, but actually proposed a complex
theory of it. The foregoing essay assumes that interpretation of James’s no-
tion of truth. However, as I mentioned there, in his (otherwise) fine study of
James, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience, David Lamberth has
taken issue with me and proposes that when James speaks of ‘absolute truth’
he means it not as a ‘substantive’ notion but only as a regulative idea. I dis-
cuss our disagreement here, not only because the essay presupposed the cor-
rectness of my interpretation but because Lamberth’s arguments are really
arguments against the tenseless notion of truth itself and this is an inde-
pendently important philosophical matter.
One of James’s definitions of ‘absolute truth’ is the following:
[Rickert and Münsterberg] accuse relativists—and we pragmatists are typical

relativists—of being debarred by their self-adopted principles, not only from
the privilege which rationalist philosophers enjoy, of believing that these princi-
ples of their own are truth impersonal and absolute, but even of framing the
abstract notion of such a truth, in the pragmatic sense of an ideal opinion in which
all men might agree) and which no man should ever wish to change. Both charges
are wide of the mark.18 I myself, as a pragmatist, believe in my account of the
truth as firmly as any rationalist can possibly believe in his. And I believe in it
for the very reason that I have the account of truth which my learned adversaries

18. The other charge to which James refers is that pragmatists are debarred from
believing that their own philosophy is absolutely true.

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contend that no pragmatist can frame. I expect, namely, that the more fully
men discuss and test my account, the more they will agree that it fits, and the
less they will desire a change. I may, of course, be premature in this confidence,
and the glory of being truth final and absolute may fall upon some later revision
and correction of my scheme, which will then be judged untrue in just the
measure in which it departs from that final satisfactory formulation.19
Against what seems to me the plain sense of this passage, Lamberth offers
his interpretation of James’s expression ‘absolute truth’ as no more than a “phe-
nomenological” expression of a “mandate” to continue inquiry: “The prag-
matic meaning of absolute truth, then, appears to find its distinction for James
in the habit or mandate of searching for more truth [by which Lamberth
means merely more and better-confirmed successful belief ], a habit that criti-
cally does (and should) animate and pervade our actual processes of knowing
in the present.”20 In short, on Lamberth’s interpretation, ‘absolute truth’ is only
an ideal, and it has meaning only as inspiring the practice of continuing to
search for revisions and improvements of our present opinions. On his inter-
pretation, James does not really believe that his account of absolute truth is
impersonally and absolutely true in the way a rationalist believes that his is, nor
does he really believe there is such a thing as ‘the shape of that truth’.
The reason for Lamberth’s reluctance to concede that James could have meant
it when he insisted that he has “the abstract notion of such a truth” and believes
that his account of what it is to be an absolute truth is itself “truth impersonal
and absolute” as firmly as any rationalist can possibly believe in his appears to be
that he believes that an absolute notion of truth is a notion of truth as unrevis-
able, ‘guaranteed’, and for James to have such a notion would be incompatible
with his fallibilism, indeed with pragmatism itself. Thus he writes:
A crucial question remains from Putnam’s analysis, since Putnam rejects this
pragmatic interpretation of absolute truth [i.e., Lamberth’s analysis of absolute
truth as “ever only a putative object” of the drive to test knowledge and “orga-
nize it into systems of knowing”].21 Does James’s notion of absolute truth do any
epistemological work beyond articulating this (nonetheless crucial) habitual
animation of inquiry? And if so, work of what sort? To put the question another
way, does James’s notion of truth as a ‘regulative ideal’ function metaphysically

20. Lamberth, William James, 219.
21. Ibid.

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or epistemologically to regulate, or partially yet objectively determine, the truth

of particular opinions or statements? Does ‘truth absolute’ function for James to
explain the conditions of the possibility of absolute truths being made (outside
of its representation of our psychological drive for truth) beyond what we al-
ready know of the functional account of knowledge about?
Based on my interpretation of James in this text, the general answer with
respect to absolute truth must be no. For James truth, or perhaps more aptly
‘trueness’ or ‘truthfulness,’ applies to particular ideas or statements advanced
and tested in concrete, finite processes of knowing. Many of these truths be-
come stable and unquestioned parts of our knowledge, and thus components
of our habits of action. But none do so by virtue of their connection to some-
thing we might refer to as absolute truth. Truth for James is fundamentally
piecemeal and plural, always relative to its situated ‘trowers’ and subject to
revision, regardless of how direct or repeated verifications might be, or how
reliable their ideas may prove with respect to other truths and other knowers.
. . . Truth absolute, then, is a necessary conceptual commitment, expressive of
our phenomenological awareness of our philosophical desire for systematic
and thorough knowledge, and thus instructive of habit. But truth absolute
provides no guarantees, and itself is not guaranteed.22
But this is a confusion. Of course, ‘tenseless’ truth, truth not relativized

to evidence, to the borders of experience at a particular time and place is,
once what it concerns has taken place, unalterable (as James himself says).23
‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon’ is unalterable. But ‘unalterability’ is an onto-
logical notion, while ‘subject to revision’ is an epistemic one. The fact that
Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon is unalterable (if he did) does not mean that
the judgment that he crossed the Rubicon is not subject to revision.24
22. Ibid., 219–220.

23. See Perry, Thought and Character, 2:478.
24. There is an old bad argument against the idea of ‘absolute’ truth, to the effect
that ‘we can never know’ whether a statement is absolutely (i.e., tenselessly) true, and
hence the statement that, for example, it is absolutely true that snow is white is with-
out empirical meaning. The mistake is that if we can know that ‘snow is white’ is
confirmed, to at least some degree, then we can also know that the statement ‘“Snow
is white” is true’ is confirmed to the same degree, by virtue of the logical equivalence
of ‘Snow is white’ and ‘“Snow is white” is true’. I do not know if this argument is be-
hind Lamberth’s repeated portrayal of absolute truth as unrevisable (if my account of
it is correct).

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Before I answer Lamberth’s “crucial question,” I need to make a couple of

preliminary observations:
1. In one place, Lamberth reads me (incorrectly) as charging James with violat-
ing the disquotational principle of logic (the principle that p is equivalent to ‘p’ is
true).25 He also claims that on his reading, according to which what James means
by ‘truth’ when it occurs without a qualifier is what Pragmatism calls ‘relative’
truth, or truth within the borders of experience at the time a judgment is made,
James does not violate the disquotation principle.26 But this is simply a mistake.
To see this, notice that the statement that the earth is ‘flat’, not a sphere, was
25. Lamberth, William James, 222. In fact, the question of violating the disquotation
principle arose only as one horn of a dilemma. The problem that I raised with James’s the-
ory of truth in “James’s Theory of Truth” is that, if p’s being true always depends on the
coming-to-be of a consensus that p, then the truth-value of every statement about the past
depends on what will happen in the future—and that cannot be right. I argued that if the past
is indeed ‘unalterable’, as James says, then either that means that it is a reality that Lizzie
Borden committed the murders or a reality that she did not, independently of whether ei-
ther of those judgments becomes the consensus in the future, in which case the disquota-
tion principle wouldn’t be valid (it could be that Lizzie Borden committed the murders, but
the eventual consensus would be that she did not, and so ‘Lizzie Borden committed the
murders’ would not be true); or, I suggested, James might say that the reality is immutable
but what is true of the reality is not—but taking this horn of the dilemma would contradict
his reply to Lane, in which the unalterability of the past was explained by saying that it is
only those truths about the past that refer to relations between the past things and future
things that are able to ‘grow and alter’. Today I would add that yet another possibility
would be to say that the consensus about things that have already happened became ‘fated’
when the things finished occurring; but this would be implausible since, for one thing, the
consensus does not only depend on what happened in the past but on how we shall try in
the future to determine what happened—and whether we try to investigate this at all—and
this sort of human decision is not ‘fated’, on James’s metaphysics. It is because of this diffi-
culty, I believe, that Peirce shifted from defining truth in terms of what the ultimate con-
sensus will be to defining it in terms of what it would be if intelligent investigators went on
investigating forever. But James is not a Peircean realist with respect to counterfactuals. I
believe that James simply never thought through the issue.
26. “On James’s view, should we be in the position of knowing more definitively
the fact that p (or not p), then revision of the truthfulness of the judgment would follow
dynamically.” Ibid. Lamberth is right that (if we are rational) whenever we revise the
belief ‘p is warrantedly assertible’ we also revise the belief that p, and vice versa, but it
is nevertheless false that warranted assertibility (Lamberth’s ‘truth in the making’)
obeys the disquotation principle.

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warrantedly assertible for thousands of years. Today it is warrantedly assertible

that the earth is round. If truth were identical with warranted assertibility (‘true-
ness’), it would follow that the statement that the earth is flat was true for thou-
sands of years while the statement that the earth is round is true today. But, by the
disquotational principle, this would mean that the earth was flat for thousands of
years and is round today—that is, that the earth changed its shape, which is not
the case. Moreover, William James clearly distanced himself from the idea that
truth sans phrase is tensed in the way that ‘relative’ truth is when he wrote that
“ptolemaic astronomy, euclidean space, aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics,
were expedient for centuries, but human experience has now boiled over those
limits, and we call those things only relatively true, or true within those borders of
experience. ‘Absolutely’ they are false; for we know that those limits were casual,
and might have been transcended by past theorists just as they are by present
thinkers.”27
2. Lamberth and I are arguing about whether I am right to attribute a
‘Peircean strain’ to James. So it is important to understand what Peirce’s own
notion of truth does and does not entail. Famously, Peirce identified what is
true with “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who
investigate.”28 But that does not mean that truth is not “piecemeal and plu-
ral,” in the sense of consisting of individual true statements.29 What Peirce
posits is that for each meaningful question there is a time at which a stable
consensus as to which is the right answer to that question will be achieved;
27. James, Pragmatism, in Works, 1:106–107.

28. Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:68 [§407]. On Peirce’s fallibilism, see my introduc-
tion to Lecture 4 in C. S. Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things, ed. Kenneth Laine
Ketner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 72–75.
29. Lamberth believes that it is the whole system of absolute truths that James means
by ‘absolute truth’, and not individual statements. I agree that James sometimes uses
the term this way, referring to ‘absolute truth’ as a kind of ideal limit, and I further
agree that this ideal limit is only an ideal. It is concerning absolute truth in the sense of
such an ‘ideal vanishing point’ or ‘ideal set of formulations’ that James says in
Pragmatism, “It runs on all fours with the perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely
complete experience” (106–107). But James also says that ‘absolutely’ individual scien-
tific theories such as Ptolemaic astronomy are false. And it is also not true, as Lamberth
claims, that James never says of individual propositions (or small groups of proposi-
tions) that they are absolutely true; James’s ‘scheme’ (i.e., his theory of truth) is such a
group of individual propositions, and it is this that he says he believes to be true abso-
lutely, in the passage from The Meaning of Truth, in Works, vol. 2.

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this does not mean that at that time (or at any time) we shall have a guaran-
tee that we have reached the stable answer, and it does not mean that there is
any time at which all questions will have reached a stable answer. On my
reading, the same is true on James’s account. So when Lamberth attributes
to James the view that “truth absolute is not guaranteed” he is, of course,
right, but that is no argument at all against the idea that individual state-
ments can be absolutely (i.e., tenselessly) true on James’s account.
What, now, of Lamberth’s “crucial question,” the question “Does ‘truth
absolute’ function for James to explain the conditions of the possibility of
absolute truths being made (outside of its representation of our psychologi-
cal drive for truth)?” My answer is that the fact that it is (tenselessly) true
that Franklin Roosevelt was president of the United States in 1940 is not a
different fact from the fact that Franklin Roosevelt was president of the
United States in 1940. And that fact certainly is the best explanation why
our memories (the ones of those of us who were alive then) and our history
books and our newspapers from that year all say that he was. In other words,
the tenseless truth of a true empirical proposition is (usually) the best expla-
nation of its warranted assertibility at the present time.

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13
James’s Philosophical
Friendships, 1902–1905
Hilary Putnam
IN THE LATE WINTER of 1902 William James informed his friend Frances
Rollins Morse that he had “finished the Gifford lectures at 5.45 this after-
noon,” adding “memorable date in literary history, but still more so in that
of W. J.!.”1 James had finished what was to be the published version of The
Varieties of Religious Experience.
He had delivered the first series of ten Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh
during the summer of 1901 and would deliver the concluding ten lectures
during the coming summer. By the end of the period covered by the letters
in the period 1902–1905, he had published not only Varieties but also the
central ideas of the metaphysics that he called “radical empiricism.” In fact,
during the fall of 1904 and the beginning of 1905 James “undertook the
production of a torrent of philosophical articles,” including “Does
‘Consciousness’ Exist?,” “A World of Pure Experience,” “Humanism and
Truth,” “The Pragmatic Method,” “The Thing and Its Relations,” “The
Experience of Activity,” “The Essence of Humanism,” and “How Two Minds
1. William James, The Correspondence of William James, vol. 10: 1902–March 1905,
ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 2002), 9.

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Can Know One Thing.”2 It is amazing that so much of this activity took
place during a period of poor health. In the fall of 1899 James had suffered
severely from the beginnings of a heart condition; in addition, for much of
his life he battled periods of what we would today diagnose as depression.
Much of the actual writing of Varieties had been done in bed at times
when he was able to work at most only two or three hours a day. Illness,
coupled with the fact that the writing went much more slowly than he had
planned, forced James to give up the idea of making the second series of
lectures into an extensive treatment of the philosophy, as opposed to the
psychology, of religion. It is in this period that James emphatically asserted
his identity as a philosopher. No longer would he be considered just a psy-
chologist who dabbled in philosophy. He repeatedly affirmed the unique-
ness of that philosophical identity; or rather—and this certainly compli-
cates the picture—he minimized all differences with three philosophers he
regarded as allies: Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, John Dewey, and, after
a certain point, Henri Bergson. At the same time he stressed (and at times
exaggerated) his differences with most other philosophers, especially the
idealists. The letter to Italian philosopher and psychologist Giulio Cesare
Ferrari emphasizes James’s shift from psychology to philosophy and his ab-
sorption with the task of working out this new and original Weltanschauung
of pragmatism–humanism–radical empiricism: “I have got to working alto-
gether outside of psychological lines, as some articles which I have recently
sent you will show. I am interested in a metaphysical system (‘Radical
Empiricism’) which has been forming itself within me, more interested, in
fact, than I have ever been in any thing else; but it is very difficult to get it
into shape for any connected exposition.”3
James’s correspondence in this period is important also in that it allows us
to follow the development of a number of his philosophical friendships, in
particular those with Bergson, Schiller, and Dewey. The letters show James’s
2. The quotation is from David C. Lamberth in his fine study, William James and
the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 148. All
of the James papers mentioned here—except “Humanism and Truth,” which is col-
lected in James’s The Meaning of Truth, in Works, vol. 2, and “The Pragmatic Method,”
which is collected in Essays in Philosophy, in Works, vol. 5—are included in James’s
Essays in Radical Empiricism, in Works, vol. 3.
3. James, Correspondence, 554.

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JAMES’S PHILOSOPHICAL FRIENDSHIPS, 1902–1905 203
continuing efforts to help his old friend Charles Sanders Peirce, who strug-
gled continually with extreme financial problems as well as with difficulties
in publishing his logical and philosophical work. In addition, we can see
how James’s correspondence even with an outright philosophical opponent
like Francis Herbert Bradley could gradually turn into something like a gen-
uine epistolary friendship. In this article I shall examine each of these series
of letters and try to set them against the proper philosophical background.
In 1896 Henri Bergson sent an inscribed copy of Matière et Mémoire to
William James.4 But this and other early contacts did not produce any real
effect. However, by 1902 James can inform Bergson that while he finds
Bergson’s system in need of “building out” in a number of directions, he is
now able to say that he understands its main lines “very well at present”:
It is a work of exquisite genius. It makes a sort of Copernican revolution as

much as Berkeley’s Principles or Kant’s Critique did, and will probably, as it
gets better & better known, open a new area of philosophical discussion. It
fills my mind with all sorts of new questions and hypotheses, and brings the
old into a most agreeable liquefaction. I thank you from the bottom of my
heart.
The Hauptpunkt acquired for me is your conclusive demolition of the du-
alism of object and subject in perception. I believe that the ‘transcendency’ of
the object will not recover from your treatment, and as I myself have been
working for many years past on the same line, only with other general concep-
tions than yours, I find myself most agreeably corroborated. My health is so
poor now that work goes on very slowly, but I am going, if I live, to write a
general system of metaphysics which in many of its fundamental ideas agrees
closely with what you have set forth, and the agreement inspires and encour-
ages me more than you can well imagine.5
On 6 January 1903, in a letter written in French Bergson responded in

equally glowing terms:
I have just completed the reading of the book which you were kind enough to
send to me, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and I am anxious to tell you
4. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory [Matière et Mémoire (1896)], trans. N. M.
Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Cosimo, 2007).
5. 14 December 1902, in James, Correspondence, 167.

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what a profound impression the reading of it has made on me. I began it at

least a dozen days ago, and since that moment I have been able to think of
nothing else, so captivating and—if you will permit me to say it—so moving,
is the book from end to end. You have, it seems to me, succeeding in extract-
ing the quintessence of the religious emotion. No doubt we already felt that
this emotion is both a joy sui generis and the consciousness of a union with a
superior power, but it was the nature of this joy and this union which ap-
peared to be capable neither of analysis nor of expression, and which never-
theless you have been able to analyze and express—thanks to a quite novel
procedure, which consists in giving the reader in sequence a series of impres-
sions d’ensemble which intersect and at the same time fuse with one another in
his mind. There you have opened a way in which you will certainly be fol-
lowed by many others, but in which you have gone so far that it will be diffi-
cult to pass or even overtake you.6
In the next two months, James even considered a European trip, partly for
the purpose of seeing Bergson, but the two men did not succeed in meeting
until 28 May 1905.
In spite of the obvious mutual admiration, not to say enthusiasm, there
are real if subtle differences in the evolving metaphysical systems of these
two thinkers. But neither the degree of the affinity of their thought nor the
subtle differences are apparent in the correspondence of the period 1902–
1905. Rather, James expresses his puzzlement at the meaning of various of
Bergson’s formulations: “I have read with great delight your article in the
Rev. de Metaph. for January, agree thoroughly with all its critical part, and
wish that I might see in your intuition metaphysique the full equivalent for a
philosophy of concepts. Neither seems to be a full equivalent for the other,
unless indeed the intuition becomes completely mystical (and that I am
willing to believe) but I don’t think that that is just what you mean.”7 This
remark indicates that James was only beginning to work his way into under-
standing Bergson’s system of thought because Bergson by no means thought
that “intuition metaphysique” was any kind of “full equivalent” for “a phi-
losophy of concepts.” What Bergson thought was that conceptual thinking
in many ways misrepresents the flux of direct experience, which is what reality
6. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 2:606–607.
7. 25 February 1903, in James, Correspondence, 204.

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is, for both James and Bergson. Moreover, this is just the view that James
comes to defend—with plentiful and generous acknowledgments of
Bergson’s influence—in A Pluralistic Universe (1909).
More than a year later, in a letter to Arthur Lovejoy, James is still express-
ing puzzlement about Bergson’s ideas, writing: “Have you read Bergson? He
is the puzzle for me just now. Such incessant gleams of truth on such an
obscure background.”8 Even in A Pluralistic Universe, James concedes, “I
have to confess that Bergson’s originality is so profuse that many of his ideas
baffle me entirely. I doubt whether any one understands him all over, so to
speak; and I am sure that he would himself be the first to see that this must
be, and to confess that things which he himself has not yet thought out
clearly had yet to be mentioned and have a tentative place assigned them in
his philosophy.”9 The difference is that by the time James wrote these latter
words he understood fully Bergson’s criticism of what James calls “concep-
tual logic or intellectualism,” and the whole of Lecture 6 in A Pluralistic
Universe is an account and an endorsement of that criticism.
It will be worthwhile to digress for a moment from the letters themselves
to give an account of the issues on which Bergson and James were in the
process of coming into agreement. If we focus on James’s metaphysics rather
than his pragmatist epistemology, we find three central claims. In the first
place, using a term borrowed from Avenarius, James holds that “pure expe-
rience” is the “stuff’’ of which reality consists, making his view “formally
monist,” in Lamberth’s phrase. And in the second place, for James pure ex-
perience is neither mental nor physical. Mental events and physical things
are simply aggregates “cut out” by us rather than intrinsically distinguished
within the stream of pure experience.10 The third claim is that the same bit
of pure experience that is a part of my mind is capable of being a part of
someone else’s mind as well, thereby rejecting solipsism from the start.
Experience is not “private” and perception is “direct.” For example, the color
I experience when I look at Harvard’s Memorial Hall really is an aspect of
Memorial Hall, not merely a “sensation” that represents a physical property
8. 7 February 1904, in ibid., 377.

9. James, A Pluralistic Universe, in Works, 4:101–102.
10. This feature of the doctrine—a feature Bertrand Russell endorsed in his Analysis
of Mind—led Russell to call this sort of doctrine “neutral monism.”

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with no sensuous content of its own.11 These three features enable James to
believe that he had found, or at least begun to work out, a metaphysics that
simultaneously overcomes the disjunction between subject and object, be-
tween object-in-the-mind and object-in-the-world, and between one’s own
mind and other minds.
Even though “pure experience” is conceived of as “neutral,” the very use of
the term ‘experience’ pushes one to think of James’s world as a world of “expe-
rience” in a more traditional sense; that is, it inclines one to think of James’s
view as either a species of idealism or a species of panpsychism or both, and by
the time he gave the Hibbert Lectures (A Pluralistic Universe), James himself
would write of “the great empirical movement towards a pluralistic panpsychic
view of the universe, into which our own generation has been drawn,” and also
refer to the view he put forward in those lectures as “the panpsychic system.”12
Indeed, as early as his 1881 “Reflex Action and Theism,” James asserted that “all
modern thought converges towards idealistic or panpsychic conclusions.”13
In spite of a number of disagreements over details, for both Bergson and
James reality itself is no more than the stream of experience, even if “experi-
ence” is a much bigger and more many-sided thing than traditional empiri-
cism thought it was.14 There are two further points of agreement, which ac-
count for the powerful and growing sympathy between these two thinkers.
Both hold that reality is at best superficially revealed in conceptual thinking and
that there is such a thing as unconceptualized experience, of which we can
have an unmediated and almost mystical direct knowledge, which Bergson
referred to as “intuition.” And second, that in some way concepts actually
falsify the character of unconceptualized experience, which means that all
our concepts falsify, and must falsify, the ways (note the plural!) that reality
most fundamentally is.
11. See Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999), and also “Pragmatism and Realism,” in The Revival
of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. M. Dickstein
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), for a defense of the importance of
James’s revival of direct realism with respect to perception.
12. James, A Pluralistic Universe, 141–142.
13. “We are indeed internal parts of God and not external creations, on any possi-
ble reading of the panpsychic system.” Ibid., 143.

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Bergson’s arguments, as reformulated by James in A Pluralistic Universe,

will certainly seem unacceptable to a modern analytic philosopher. For ex-
ample, both Bergson and James think that Zeno’s paradox shows that the
notions of motion and change are contradictory, and of course no trained
mathematician or logician could regard this as anything but a blunder.15 A
more interesting argument is that “conceptual logic” asserts that any two
objects or properties have well-defined identity conditions; this does not seem
to be true for experiential objects and properties, which are the “real” objects
and properties in the philosophies of Bergson and James. To use James’s ex-
ample from A Pluralistic Universe, two color patches may be such that nei-
ther can be distinguished from a third patch although they can be distin-
guished from each other.16 One way out of this problem would be to conclude
that identity is not defined for colors; only indistinguishability is. But James
is quite right to think that this way out—the right one, in my view—would
have been regarded as a violation of logic itself by the great “conceptual lo-
gicians” of their day. For both Russell and Frege, for example, concepts had
to have sharp boundaries. Even Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, published more
than two decades after James’s death, still insisted on the requirement of
“definiteness of sense.”17 More recently, important philosophers and logi-
cians such as W. V. Quine, Israel Scheffler, and Timothy Williamson have
defended the view that vague predicates only pose an epistemic problem, that
we must believe the “laws of logic” when they tell us that there is a fact of the
matter as to whether each and every person is bald or not bald, or any num-
ber and arrangement of grains of sand is a heap.
It would not be indefensible, then, to argue that James and Bergson were
right to this extent: the “logic” obeyed by the data of experience, or by ob-
servable things in general, is a logic that admits vagueness and not the intel-
lectualist logic that insists that “all concepts have sharp boundaries.” But
what of their seemingly strange endorsement of Zeno’s paradox? Both argue
15. For an excellent account of James and Bergson’s eventual disagreements, as well
as their agreements, see Lamberth, William James, 180–183.
16. James presents this argument, attributing it to Bergson but clearly endorsing it,
in A Pluralistic Universe, in Works, 4:102–104.
17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden
(London: Kegan Paul, 1922), 2.15.

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that we must reject logic since we know that motion is real by direct experi-
ence, while Zeno’s arguments make motion impossible as a matter of logic.18
The charge of “straightforward mistake” is actually not as easy to make
out as one may at first think. For while it is not inconsistent, mathematically
speaking, to think of a motion from point a to a point b as passing through
an actual infinity of points between a and b in a finite time, where each of
these infinitely many points is itself passed through at a mathematical in-
stant, James also holds that a “present time” is no mathematical instant. Given
that the ontology of radical empiricism excludes mathematical instants, to
simply appeal to the ontology of the differential calculus to convict Bergson
and James of error is begging the question. But the issues are too complex
for me to pursue further here. Instead I shall simply close with a quotation
from A Pluralistic Universe that illustrates how “Bergsonian” James would
later become:
Time itself comes in drops. Our ideal decomposition of the drops, which are
all that we feel into still finer fractions is but an incident in that great trans-
formation of the perceptual order into a conceptual order of which I spoke in
my last lecture. It is made in the interest of our rationalizing faculty solely.
The times directly felt in the experiences of living subjects have originally no
common measure. Let a lump of sugar melt in a glass, to use one of M.
Bergson’s instances. We feel the time to be long while waiting for the process
to end, but who knows how long or how short it feels to the sugar? All felt
times coexist and overlap or compenetrate each other thus vaguely; but the
artifice of plotting them on a common scale helps us to reduce their aborigi-
nal confusion, and it helps us still more to plot, against the same scale, the
successive possible steps into which nature’s various changes may be resolved,
either sensibly or conceivably. We thus straighten out the aboriginal privacy
and vagueness, and can date things publicly, as it were, and by each other.19
If their correspondence during the period 1902–1905 suggests less affinity

between Bergson’s views and James’s than was to become evident a few years
18. Note Peirce’s challenge to James on this point: “As for Zeno’s ‘argument,’ what
argument, I should be glad to know? State it definitely to a mathematician.” 23 January
1903, in James, Correspondence, 181.
19. See my argument that this is the right thing to say in Part 2, Lecture 3 of The
Threefold Cord.

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later, the great enthusiasm that James expresses for Schiller’s contribution to
creating something like a Humanist Party can easily obscure the difference
between their views, as Perry long ago noted.20 James was out to revolution-
ize philosophy, and he was willing to embrace a variety of allies, including
Ernst Mach, Schiller, Dewey, Bergson, and the Italian irrationalist (and later
Fascist) Giovanni Papini, all of whom certainly did not agree with each
other. James hoped that together they could sweep the existing philosophical
orthodoxy—absolute idealism in all its forms—from the scene and procure
worldwide agreement on at least the methodological aspects of pragmatism.
For James, there would continue healthy disagreements about just what the
“pragmatic method” ought to lead to. Ironically, absolute idealism was in-
deed to be swept from the scene but not by pragmatism, although pragma-
tist polemics may have played a part in its demise. The movement that even-
tually succeeded it, first in England and later in the United States, was the
movement now called “analytic philosophy,” a movement initiated by two
arch-intellectualists, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. However, pragma-
tism is presently undergoing a revival; the story is certainly not yet finished!
If James plays down his intellectual disagreements with Schiller, he does not
always conceal his dismay at Schiller’s flamboyant rhetoric and bellicose tac-
tics, often advising Schiller to soften the tone in his writings and to “buckle
down now to s’thing very solemn and systematic! Write your jokes by all
means, but expunge them in proof, and save them for a posthumous no. of
Mind!”21 Schiller, for his part, always finds reasons why he cannot—or should
not—tone down his rhetoric. Or he simply fails to take James’s advice.
In July 1904 Bradley writes James expressing rage at what he reports are
personal attacks by Schiller: “He not only attributes to me mental dishon-
esty but apparently deliberate dishonesty towards my public in concealing
my real opinions.”22 No doubt for this reason, James writes Schiller that
personally I relish greatly your irony and flights of metaphor, but from the
point of view of party politics, I am sure that they ought not to be allowed full
headway. . . .
It is astonishing how many persons resent in your past writings what seems
20. Schiller disliked the term ‘pragmatism’ and much preferred ‘humanism’.
21. 1 February 1904, in James, Correspondence, 371.
22. 4 July 1904, in ibid., 431.

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to them ‘bad taste’ in the way of polemical jeers and general horse-play.
Solemn as an owl and tender as a dove, should be your watchword from now
on. . . . I think your whole mental tone against our critics is overstrained.
They don’t try to misrepresent—they simply have “absoluteness” so ingrained
in them that they can’t conceive of what any alternative can mean.23
But Schiller never does reform and three years later, in a letter written in
1907, James is still scolding:
It was so easy to let Bradley with his approximations and grumblings alone.
So few people would find these last statements of his seductive enough to
build them into their own thought. But you, for the pure pleasure of the op-
eration, chase him up and down his windings, flog him into and out of his
corners, stop him and cross reference him and counter on him, as if required
to do so by your office. . . . Moreover, the reference to Bradley’s relation to me
in this article is too ironical not to seem a little ‘nasty’ to some readers; there-
fore out with it, if it be not too late.24
The philosophical disagreement between Schiller and James to which I

refer is the following. In contemporary terms, Schiller’s position has ele-
ments that resemble both Nelson Goodman’s and Richard Rorty’s. Goodman
indeed thought that the notion of a reality underlying the various ways we
conceptualize it is perfectly useless. In Ways of Worldmaking he wrote: “We
cannot test a version by comparing it with a world undescribed, undepicted,
unperceived. . . . While we may speak of determining which versions are
right as ‘learning about the world,’ the world supposedly being that which
all right versions describe, all that we learn about the world is contained in
right versions of it; and while the underlying world, bereft of these, need not
be denied to those who love it, it is perhaps on the whole a world well lost.”25
Schiller would perhaps not have gone quite as far. He seems to think there is
a plastic material behind the flux of conceptualized appearance. However,
23. 9 August 1904, in ibid., 446–447.

24. William James, The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James Jr. (Boston:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 2:281–282.
25. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978), 4.

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the net effect is the same: the world-that-we-can-know is not usefully

thought of, in Schiller’s view, as constrained by what it is apart from us.
In Pragmatism, where James does at least hint at his difference with
Schiller, he finally tells us:
Mr. Schiller sometimes seems almost to leave it an open question whether

there be anything else [than “human motives” and “human satisfactions”].
“The world,” he says, “is essentially vλη [i.e., a mere raw material], it is what
we make of it.26 It is fruitless to define it by what it originally was or by what
it is apart from us . . . it is what is made of it. Hence . . . the world is plastic.”
He adds that we can learn the limits of the plasticity only by trying, and that
we ought to start as if it were wholly plastic, acting methodically on that as-
sumption, and stopping only when we are decisively rebuked.
This is Mr. Schiller’s butt-end-foremost statement of the humanist posi-
tion, and it has exposed him to severe attack.27
What James himself believes is that we have a direct contact with reality
itself, however fleeting. This direct contact constrains how we are and are not
able to conceptualize it, even if it does not dictate a unique interest-independent
conceptualization. He goes on to say that reality is in general what truths have
to take account of; and the first part of reality from this point of view is the flux
of our sensations. Sensations are forced upon us, coming we know not whence.
Over their nature, order, and quantity we have as good as no control. They are
neither true nor false; they simply are. It is only what we say about them, only
the names we give them, our theories of their source and nature and remote
relations, that may be true or not.
The second part of reality, as something that our beliefs must also obedi-
ently take account of, is the relations that obtain between our sensations or
between their copies. James holds that “we have a certain freedom” in our
dealings with these elements of reality, and that in particular “which [of our
sensations] we attend to, note, and make emphatic in our conclusions de-
26. He refers to the elements of reality that play this role as “sensations” and “rela-
tions” in Pragmatism (Works, vol. 1) where he cannot use the terminology of “pure ex-
perience” because he has chosen not to presuppose his radical empiricism in those
lectures.
27. Ibid., 117.

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pends on our own interests; and, according as we lay the emphasis here or
there, quite different formulations of truth result. We read the same facts
differently. ‘Waterloo,’ with the same fixed details, spells a ‘victory’ for an
englishman; for a frenchman it spells a ‘defeat.”’28 James cautions against
carrying this thought too far because “both the sensational and the relational
parts of reality are dumb; they say absolutely nothing about themselves. We
it is who have to speak for them. This dumbness of sensations has led such
intellectualists as T. H. Green and Edward Caird to shove them almost be-
yond the pale of philosophic recognition, but pragmatists refuse to go so
far.”29
In the same vein James cautions Schiller that “after all, our side is only
half developed. I am sure that not one of us has any clear idea of what the
ultimate pre-human fact—which we encounter and which works, through all
our stratified predicates, upon us—the hyle as you call it—really is or signi-
fies.”30
But the clearest statement of James’s realism is undoubtedly in a letter
written after the period 1902–1905, the letter to Dickinson Miller dated 5
August 1907, in which James uses the following analogy:
The world per se may be likened to a cast of beans on a table. By themselves

they spell nothing. An onlooker may group them as he likes. He may simply
count them all and map them. He may select groups and name these capri-
ciously, or name them to suit certain extrinsic purposes of his.
Whatever he does, so long as he takes account of them, his account is nei-
ther false nor irrelevant. If neither, why not call it true? It fits the beans-minus-
him, and expresses the total fact, of beans-plus-him.”31
Here we see quite clearly that James believes that although different right
descriptions are possible, corresponding to different purposes, still the
“world per se” is not infinitely plastic; there is a relation of “fitting the beans,”
as well as a relation of “expressing the total fact.” I wrote that James “hinted
at” his difference with Schiller, because his expression “butt-end-foremost
28. Ibid., 118.

29. Ibid.
30. 9 August 1904, in James, Correspondence, 447.
31. 5 August 1907, in Ibid., 431.

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statement of the humanist position” is designed to make it sound as if

Schiller and James have the same position and Schiller has only presented it
wrongly. As Perry puts it:
He implied that in the end the two views would coincide, since Schiller must
come out with an objective view of reality and he with a subjective view of
truth. But this difference of emphasis does in fact involve a difference of meta-
physics, which might be expressed by saying that while James had a meta-
physics over and above his theory of knowledge, Schiller (like Dewey) took
the cognitive process itself as a sample of reality. His world was a pragmatic
world—a world in the making, after the manner of truthmaking.
But there is another difference. . . . James tells us that whereas both the
scholastics and the panpsychists believe in a real “core” within the man-made
wrappings of knowledge, Schiller and Dewey recognize only a “limit” to the
process of mediation, or a plastic material which has no characters save as
thought confers upon it. Although James was too tolerant to exclude other
alternatives, it is clear that he is on the side of the “core” and that he identifies
that core with sensible experience.32
In these comments Perry was quite right as far as James’s differences

with Schiller are concerned, but quite mistaken in coupling Schiller and
Dewey in the way he did. What Perry missed was that Dewey believed that
thought is answerable to a “core” that is not created by thought. In Dewey’s
idealist period that core was sensation. After Dewey’s turn to pragmatism
it was neither sensation nor Jamesian “pure experience” but the stubborn
facts that (1) certain situations are objectively unresolved or “problematic,”
(2) certain courses of action succeed in objectively resolving the problems
that we “constitute” out of problematic situations, and (3) certain experi-
ences are objectively “consummatory”—that is, revelatory of cognitive-aes-
thetic unities that are part of human flourishing. Although this terminol-
ogy appears in Dewey’s writing for the most part after 1930, it is not
difficult to discern these same convictions in the earlier work. Perhaps
Perry misses this because he thinks the hard core to which our thoughts
and beliefs must answer to be a stuff (such as James’s “pure experience”),
and this is something Dewey denies.
32. Perry, Thought and Character, 2:494–495.

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The letters between John Dewey and William James include one ex-
change whose importance needs some historical background to appreciate,
in particular two letters: that of 3 December 1903, in which James tells
Dewey that “it is a glorious thing for you and for the university to have
created such a genuine school of original thought. I cannot help believing
that you have struck the truth, and that your system has a very great fu-
ture,” and that of 19 December 1903, in which Dewey thanks James for his
“philosophic encouragement” and proceeds to defend the idea of “truth
for its own sake” on “complete pragmatic principles.”33 In fact it is already
evident from an earlier letter to Dewey of 17 October 1903 that James was
becoming enthusiastic about Dewey and the school around Dewey in the
philosophy department of the University of Chicago. But why did the
enthusiasm develop just then?
The short answer is that it was at this time that Dewey made public his
total abandonment of what was left of his attachment to absolute idealism.34
But it is worth expanding on this short answer, especially since some appre-
ciation of what absolute idealism was about is necessary also for understand-
ing the philosophic aspects of the Bradley-James interaction.
The absolute idealism that Dewey espoused, with decreasing enthusi-
asm through the 1890s, began as a distinctively British movement, with
T. H. Green and Bradley as its leaders.35 It is important to emphasize this
because today the movement is often considered to have been merely lat-
ter-day Hegelianism. Although Green and Bradley admired Hegel and
drew inspiration from him, their arguments—and in Bradley’s case, most
of the conclusions—were quite different from his. Only the idea that
human thought and experience are a “realization” and “actualization” of
the thought and experience of God (i.e., the Absolute) links them meta-
physically with Hegel even though it is far from clear that this formula-
tion is one that Hegel himself would have accepted without severe quali-
fications. Although absolute idealism is almost entirely ignored by today’s
philosophers, the leaders of the movement were distinguished and origi-
33. James, Correspondence, 336, 346, 347.

34. On this see Robert B. Westbrook’s account in John Dewey and American
Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 71–77.
35. Here I follow Westbrook’s analysis of Dewey’s intellectual trajectory. Ibid.,
61–62.

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nal thinkers with intricately structured criticisms of British empiricism,

the previously regnant movement in their country.36 In the United States,
Dewey had emerged as a rising star of the movement by the end of the
1880s.37
The idealist criticism of British empiricism was an important one. The
idealists pointed out that all knowledge of experience requires the recogni-
tion of relations as holding between different experiences.38 For example,
to have such a concept as red, let alone to predicate it of anything, we must
have recognized different red things as similar, that is, as related. Indeed, as
Peter Hylton explains, “[Green] argues that even words which seem to
pick out something which is immediately present—‘this’, ‘now’, ‘here’—
are in fact essentially general, and thus ‘relational’ in character. Many dif-
ferent places can be called truly ‘here’, and a given use of the word can
succeed in referring to a particular place only because other uses of the
word, to refer to other places, are possible.”39 However, Locke had taught
that relations are “not contained in the real essence of Things, but some-
thing extraneous and superinduced.”40 Green points out that Locke’s view
is inconsistent: “When it is said that the idea of identity, or of any other
relation, is formed upon consideration of things as existing in a certain
way, this is naturally understood to mean—indeed, otherwise it is un-
meaning—that the things are first known as existing, and that afterwards
the idea of the relation in question is formed. But according to Locke, as
36. There are exceptions: Anthony Quinton, Timothy Sprigge, and more recently
Peter Hylton, whose marvelous study of the crucial transition from absolute idealism
to realism in Russell and Moore is exemplary for the way it tries to understand the
arguments and motivations of T. H. Green and Bradley from within, and for the way
it makes those arguments and motivations accessible to philosophers with an analytic
training. See Peter Hylton, Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
37. In his review of John Dewey’s Outline of a Critical Theory of Ethics in International
Journal of Ethics 1 (1891): 503, Josiah Royce wrote that Dewey was “one of the most
brilliant, clearly conscious, and enviably confident of all our philosophical writers in
America.”
38. See Hylton, Russell, chaps. 1 and 2.
39. Ibid., 30.
40. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 2:xxv, 8.

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we have seen, the first and simplest act of knowledge possible is the per-
ception of identity between ideas.”41
James’s way of avoiding this entire problem in his own philosophy was
very different from that of absolute idealism in either Green’s or Bradley’s
version. From the very beginning, James’s “radical empiricism” insisted both
that relations are real and that they are given in experience.42 He rejected the
atomistic account of experience associated with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
Early and late, Dewey too would insist on both of these points. But for both
traditional empiricists and traditional rationalists relations are not given in
experience but somehow constituted by thought. Green begins his argumen-
tation by accepting this traditional view.
But if this traditional view is right and relations are constituted by
thought, then, since Green’s argument shows that no knowledge of experi-
ence, even the knowledge that this is an experience, is possible without the
recognition of relations, the empiricist failure to account for relations is also
a failure to account for the possibility of conscious experience. The essential
role of thought or intellectual activity in making conscious experience pos-
sible by “constituting” relations is equated by Green with what Kant de-
scribes as the mind’s activity of “synthesis.”43 That the mind does not merely
passively receive experience but plays a role in constituting it is taken to be
the essential Kantian insight.
Going from here to the Absolute required two controversial assumptions.
First, Green assumed that anything not given in experience would be a
41. T. H. Green, The Works of Thomas Hill Green, 3 vols., 3rd ed. (London: L ong-
mans, Green, 1894), 1:59.
42. “For such a philosophy [radical empiricism],” James writes in 1904, “the rela-
tions that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of
relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.” “A World
of Pure Experience,” in Essays in Radical Empiricism in Works, 3:22.
43. Some have seen the “methodological solipsism” of early logical positivism, as
formulated in Carnap’s Aufbau, as taking this tack. Rudolf Carnap, Der logische Aufbau
der Welt (Hamburg: Meiner, 1961); English translation, The Logical Structure of the
World [with Pseudoproblems in Philosophy] (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1967). Others have urged that Husserl’s “transcendental ego” in Ide en is similarly
“solipsistic” (Edmund Husserl, ldeen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und phanomenol-
ogischen Philosophie (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1913); English translation, Ideas: General
Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (London: Allen & Unwin, 1931).

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Kantian noumenon, and he followed Hegel and the other German idealists
in rejecting the idea of a “noumenal world.” This is a step with which James,
of course, must agree. But if the world is phenomenal, that is, fundamentally
experiential, and experience is constituted by thought—an assumption that
James would never accept—then there are only two possibilities: either it is
constituted by the thought of some human mind or by the thought of hu-
man minds collectively; alternatively, there must be a mind that somehow
transcends all human minds whose activity constitutes reality. This last alter-
native is the one that absolute idealists defended. To quote Peter Hylton:
In the ordinary sense of mind there are at least as many minds as there are
ordinarily competent human beings: you have one mind and I have another.
But in this sense of mind it is implausible to say that the single phenomenal
world which we all inhabit and investigate is constituted by the action of
mind. For in this case, whose mind are we to suppose is responsible for con-
stituting the world? Yours? Mine? The more the phenomenal world takes on
the aspect of full reality and objectivity, rather than simply the appearances of
things-in-themselves to us, the more pressing these questions become. . . . The
intelligence which plays a role in constituting reality is, according to Green,
no human intelligence but that of a single, eternal, self-conscious mind. Part
of the “vital truth” which Green says he accepts is that “there is a single spiri-
tual or self-conscious being of which all that is real is the activity or expres-
sion” (Green, Works, iii, 146).44
For our purposes it is important to notice that this is what philosophers call
a “transcendental argument,” that is, an a priori argument about the presup-
positions of experience or intellectual activity or knowledge. There is no trace
of the empiricist reliance on the testimony of experience, or on scientific in-
quiry in any of its empirical forms, in Green’s or, James would argue, in
Bradley’s procedure. And it is Green’s relatively formal argument for belief in
the Absolute rather than Bradley’s more mystical paths that Dewey followed in
his idealist period—a kind of argument that James naturally deplored.
Secondly, although the transcendental argument is an argument about the
presuppositions of human experience, it ends by postulating a “mind” or “in-
telligence” that is only “analogous” to human experience—and not that anal-
44. Hylton, Russell, 35.

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ogous, at that, since being God’s mind it is not even in space and time. This
step from the human mind to the Divine Mind naturally came under attack,
and as Dewey defended it in publications in the 1880s and early 1890s, he too
became subject to this attack. The attack was all the sharper because Dewey,
like James, was a psychologist as well as a philosopher, and because even in his
idealist period he called for giving empirical psychology more pride of place
than his fellow idealists had been willing to do. For example, in “Psychology as
Philosophic Method” (1886), Dewey had claimed that only psychology could
preserve the character of reality as an organic unity “which lives through its
distinctions.”45 As a philosophic method it was superior even to the new
Hegelian logic. “Logic cannot reach, however much it may point to, an actual
individual. The gathering up of the universe into the one self-conscious indi-
viduality it may assert as necessary, it cannot give it as reality.”46
Yet empiricists were quite unable to see how the existence of an Absolute
Mind in any way followed from the empirical data to which Dewey urged one
to pay attention. For example, Shadworth Hodgson (a thinker whom James
much admired) responded in the same year (1886) in an article tellingly enti-
tled “Illusory Psychology” that Dewey’s acceptance of the Absolute was based
entirely on a priori reasoning and not on any fact of experience.47 Dewey’s
textbook, Psychology, published the following year, met with a similar re-
sponse.48 James wrote Croom Robertson, the editor of Mind, that he had
picked up the book with enthusiasm “hoping for something really fresh” but
had abandoned it halfway through. “It’s no use trying to mediate between the
bare miraculous Self and the concrete particulars of individual mental lives,”
he said, “and all that D. effects by so doing is to take all the edge and definite-
ness away from the particulars when it falls to their turn to be treated.”49
In the 1890s (and here I accept Westbrook’s analysis of the development
of Dewey’s thought) Dewey gave up first the transcendental arguments, and
then the Absolute itself.50 This had, perhaps, already taken place by the pub-
45. Dewey, Early Works, 1:144–167.

46. Ibid., 166.
47. Shadworth Hodgson, “Illusory Psychology,” Mind 12 (January 1887): 83–88.
48. Dewey, Psychology, in Early Works, vol. 2.
49. James, Correspondence, 6:187–188.
50. See Westbrook, John Dewey, 62, for an account of Dewey’s gradual disenchant-
ment with absolute idealism.

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lication of Dewey’s “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” which explicitly

does without an “extra-experimental soul,” but the public announcement of
Dewey’s renunciation of absolute idealism did not come until the collabora-
tive Studies in Logical Theory.51
James’s reception of Dewey’s contribution to the Studies goes like this:
in a letter of which the beginning is missing Dewey writes that he is
sending to James “some proof from a forthcoming Decennial volumes
studies in Logical Theory written by Moore, MacLennan Thompson
Stuart, one or two others & myself as editor. You may not have time nor
inclination to read, but I wish you would glance the pages enough to see
whether you could stand for a dedication to yourself.”52 That fall James
writes that “on returning from the country yesterday, one of the first
things that greeted my eyes was your logical studies, and the to me sur-
prising words that close its preface. What have I done to merit such a
tribute.”53 A little later in the same letter he adds that “it rejoices me
greatly that your School [I mean your philosophic school] at the U. of C.
is, after this long gestation, bringing its fruits to birth in a way that will
demonstrate its great unity and vitality, and be a revelation to many peo-
ple, of American scholarship.”54
Four days later James writes to James Mark Baldwin that he “should not
be unwilling to write a review of Dewey’s Studies in Logical Theory—or
possibly, still better, a general article on the Chicago school of thought.”55
In December, James writes Dewey the letter already mentioned, in which
he informs Dewey that “I have just scribbled off a review of your Decennial
Output, for the Psych. Rev., very superficial summary, just to call atten-
tion to its importance,” and goes on to describe “the delight with which all
51. Dewey, Early Works, 5:96–110. See also Studies in Logical Theory, in Middle
Works, 2:293–375.
52. 20 March 1903, in James, Correspondence, 10:215.
53 .17 October 1903, in ibid., 321. Dewey’s preface reads: “For both inspiration and
the forging of the tools with which the writers have worked there is a pre-eminent ob-
ligation on the part of all of us to William James, of Harvard University, who, we hope,
will accept this acknowledgment and this book as unworthy tokens of a regard and an
admiration that are coequal” (Studies in Logical Theory in Middle Works, 2:296–297).
54. 17 October 1903, in James, Correspondence, 321.
55. 21 October 1903, in ibid., 322.

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this work fills me.”56 From this point on Dewey and James are firm philo-
sophical allies, even though Dewey cannot associate himself with James’s
theological-panpsychist cosmological speculations.
The letters that pass between James and Charles Sanders Peirce in this period
are representative of the complex but enduringly warm relations between the
two philosophers. On the one hand we see James’s kindness, his helpfulness, his
very real and persistent attempts to relieve the poverty in which Peirce lived.
And we see Peirce’s repeated praise of James’s generosity, his affection for James,
and the uncharacteristically gentle way in which the often irascible Peirce voiced
his disagreements with James. What we do not see is any real concern on James’s
part with understanding Peirce’s system of thought—a system of thought that
was undergoing crucial development at precisely this time. James unquestion-
ably recognized Peirce’s brilliance and had profited from Peirce’s early version of
pragmatism, particularly the version represented in the two celebrated articles
“The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”—articles that
Cornel West refers to as “the birth certificate of Pragmatism.”57 But there is little
evidence that James understood—or even had much interest in trying to un-
derstand—either the profound and immensely original system of thought that
Peirce developed or the investigations that he was required to undertake in the
course of developing that system. These investigations included the develop-
ment of the logic of the quantifiers in the form that directly influenced later
logicians, the foundation of semiotics as an intellectual discipline, the construc-
tion of a philosophy of mathematics and logic, including an account of the
continuum, and the cutting-edge philosophy of physics.58 Indeed, in the letter
to Dickinson Miller of 31 March 1903 in which James’s exasperation at Peirce
bursts out, he expresses the view that Peirce is a sort of self-indulgent failure.
56. 3 December 1903 in ibid., 336.

57. C. S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” Popular Science Monthly 12 (November
1877): 1–15, and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly 12 (January
1878): 286–302; both reprinted in Collected Papers, vol. 5. Regarding West’s remark,
West used this expression in a lecture course he and I taught together on “Pragmatism
and NeoPragmatism.” My own, perhaps overheated, way of describing the seminal
role of these articles was to call them “the Communist Manifesto of the Pragmatist
movement.”
58. For the justification of these claims see my paper “Peirce the Logician,” Realism
with a Human Face (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 252–260.

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Yet the first sentence of the preface to the best compact overview of
Peirce’s thought as a whole to date tells us quite accurately that today “many
people share the opinion that Charles S. Peirce is a philosophical giant, per-
haps the most important philosopher to have emerged in the United
States.”59 And indeed, in spite of the obscurities of some of his Nachlass, the
relevance of Peirce’s thought to the questions that were central in analytic
philosophy throughout the whole latter part of the twentieth century is ob-
vious, and so is the depth of his investigation of those questions. As Hookway
writes of Peirce, he “can seem one of the most modern or contemporary of
philosophers. If many of his views are controversial or implausible, still, on
reading his work, we are likely to feel that many of his problems are close to
the issues that are philosophically pressing today. Like Frege, he recognizably
inhabits our philosophical world, forging tools and concepts which are still
central to philosophical debate.”60 Without a doubt, William James would
have been astounded to learn that these sentences would be penned in a book
written in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
The ways in which the thought of William James and Charles Sanders
Peirce came to diverge more and more can be seen perhaps in the different
interpretations they gave to Peirce’s famous “Pragmatic Maxim.”
In “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” after first telling us that “the essence
of belief is the establishment of a habit, and different beliefs are distinguished
by the different modes of action to which they give rise,” and explaining
what he means by this for four paragraphs, Peirce famously states his
“Pragmatic Maxim”: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have prac-
tical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our con-
ception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”61 In the pre-
ceding paragraphs Peirce specified, among other things, that by “effects” he
means sensible effects—that is, perceivable effects.
In Lecture 2 of his Pragmatism, James writes:
In an article entitled “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Mr. Peirce, after point-
ing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that, to develop a
thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to pro-
59. Christopher Hookway, Peirce (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), ix.
60. Ibid., 62.
61. Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:398, 402 (emphasis added).

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duce: that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the
root of all our thought distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of
them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To
attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only con-
sider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—
what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare.
Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us
the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has posi-
tive significance at all.62
It is true that James inserts the phrase “what reactions we must prepare”
in his paraphrase of Peirce’s explanations, but this is not, in itself, a distor-
tion. Peirce did say that a belief is a “rule of conduct,” or a “habit.” But the
ways in which Peirce and James understood such words as these is another
matter.
First of all, both James and Peirce agree that to describe a habit one must
describe the end, or purpose, the conduct aims at. For James, this is to be
understood quite literally: all the mundane and not-so-mundane purposes
for which we act are relevant to the specification of our habits, and hence to
the meaning of our beliefs. Not so for Peirce.
For Peirce, especially as his thinking matures, the only notion of conduct
relevant to such logical questions as the meaning of concepts and the proper
method of inquiry is conduct that can be made a rule of action in a very
special sense. In this sense, whenever we speak of a rule of conduct, whether
in ethics (which Peirce regards as the science of the admirable in the way of
conduct, and hence as presupposing aesthetics, or the science of the admi-
rable in general) or in logic (which Peirce regards as the science of the ad-
mirable by way of scientific conduct, and hence as presupposing ethics) we
“speak with a universal voice,” as Hookway puts it, deliberately using lan-
guage from Kant’s Third Critique.63 The only ends that Peirce allows us to
consider when we enunciate rules of conduct—and hence when we clarify
62. James, Pragmatism, 27.

63. For more detail see C. S. Peirce, “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” chap.
1, in Reasoning and the Logic of Things (The Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898),
ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 105–
122, and my “Comments on the Lectures,” 55–59.

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concepts by means of the pragmatic maxim—are ends that can be held in

perpetuity, regardless of all contingencies, such as the desire to advance the
cause of science. With one stroke Peirce thus advances a conception of in-
quiry according to which “practice” in precisely the sense that interests
James—what we do about our weal and woe in our day-to-day and year-to-
year struggles and adventures in living—is irrelevant, both to the meaning
of our concepts and to the rules for the conduct of inquiry.
Secondly—and this is a problem “close to the issues that are philosophi-
cally pressing today,” according to Hookway—if we say that the meaning of
a judgment such as “diamond is harder than glass” is to be explicated by
means of conditionals like “If you press the sharp edge of a piece of glass
against a diamond, you will probably not scratch the diamond,” then we
must ask what sort of conditional is this?64
When he wrote “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Peirce still thought that
what was later to be called the “truth functional conditional” might do. By
the time of the correspondence with James in the period 1902–1905, he had
decided that the conditional had to be a counterfactual, or “subjunctive,”
conditional. This kind of conditional—the kind involved in all laws of na-
ture, according to Peirce—is fundamental and irreducible. In Peirce’s meta-
physics, the generality we express or describe when we assert a universally
quantified subjunctive conditional of the form “If a were to happen, then
(always), b would happen,” or of the form “If a were to happen indefinitely
often, then, in the long run, b would happen with probability q,” is one of
the fundamental forms of the unity of the “phaneron,” the phenomenologi-
cally given world, one of the fundamental sorts of “Thirdness,” in his catego-
rial terminology.65 When he accuses James of “nominalism” in some of his
writing, the reason isn’t that Peirce isn’t aware that James insists that he
counts relations as real; the problem is with the reason James gives. James
64. Peirce employs similar examples in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” Unlike the
later logical positivists, however, who used similar patterns of analysis, Peirce thought
such conditionals could neither be exhaustively discovered by reflection nor simply
stipulated. He believed that the full meaning of a scientific concept (“hard,” “dia-
mond”) is itself to be discovered empirically, and that our statements of its meaning are
revisable.
65. The other fundamental form, for Peirce, is thought, which like counterfactuals
exhibits generality, but of a different sort than the generality we see in laws of nature.

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insists that relations are real because they are given in experience. But what we
directly experience, according to Peirce, is feelings or Firstness, in the cate-
gorial scheme just mentioned, and reactions, or Secondness. But the reality
of a relation is the reality of a general. If you are not a realist about counter-
factuals—and I believe with Peirce that James was not—then, in Peirce’s
view, you cannot understand the way in which universals are real. The need
to be a realist about counterfactuals is something forced on us by reflection,
a kind of “presupposition of science” in a Kantian sense, rather than some-
thing given in experience in the sense of feeling and reaction.
Thus Peirce proposes a view that is neither the idealist view that relations
are “constituted” by thought nor the Jamesian view that relations are given
in experience (in James’s sense of “experience”).66 Despite the fact that Peirce
comments on some detailed points in James’s philosophy, unfortunately we
do not find any detailed comment on Peirce’s views from James.67
66. Note that Peirce, in his letter of 23 January 1903 distinguishes between his and
James’s conceptions of experience. James, Correspondence, 181.
67. For example, Peirce expresses enthusiastic agreement with James’s “splendid
argumentation on the conterminousness of minds.” 23 January 1903, in James,
Correspondence, 181. “The Conterminousness of Different Minds” is the heading of
Section 6 of James’s “A World of Pure Experience,” in Essays in Radical Empiricism,
21–44.

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14
What James’s Pragmatism

Offers Us
A Reading of the First Chapter of Pragmatism
Hilary Putnam
In Boston, in November and December of 1906, William James delivered

the Lowell Lectures, which were published the following year under the title
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. The opening lec-
ture bears the dry title “The Present Dilemma in Philosophy.” But that lec-
ture is anything but dry; considered on its literary merits alone, it must
surely be one of the finest examples of philosophical prose. And its contents
are certainly provocative. Yet it has received remarkably little discussion;
even James’s most hostile critics, who might be expected to be infuriated by
it, generally pass over it in silence. I shall speculate about why this is the case.
But first let us say how this lecture relates to our reasons for being inter-
ested in James as a philosopher today. It is clear to everyone who has read
James that he regards philosophy as something terribly important. Roughly
two and a half millennia ago, when philosophy first separated itself off
self-consciously from sophistry, one of its central objectives was to provide
rational guidance on how to live. That objective—which is James’s objec-

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tive—remained characteristic of philosophy for many centuries. It is beauti-

fully expressed in the following passage from the first century by Philo
Judaeus:
Every person—whether Greek or Barbarian—who is in training for wisdom,

leading a blameless, irreproachable life, chooses neither to commit injustice nor
return it unto others, but to avoid the company of busy bodies, and hold in
contempt the places where they spend their time—courts, councils, market-
places, assemblies—in short, every kind of meeting of thoughtless people. As
their goal is a life of peace and serenity, they contemplate nature and everything
found within her: they attentively explore the earth, the sea, the air, the sky, and
every nature found therein. Such people consider the world as their city, and its
citizens are the companions of wisdom; they have received their civic rights
from virtue, which has been entrusted with presiding over the universal com-
monwealth. Thus, filled with every excellence, they are accustomed no longer to
take account of physical discomforts or exterior evils, and they train themselves
to be indifferent to indifferent things; they are armed against both pleasures and
desires, and, in short, they always strive to keep themselves above passion. It is
obvious that people such as these, who find their joy in virtue, celebrate a festi-
val their whole life long. To be sure, there is only a small number of such people;
they are like embers of wisdom kept smoldering in our cities, so that virtue may
not be altogether snuffed out and disappear from our race. But if only people
everywhere felt the same way as this small number, and became as nature meant
for them to be: blameless, irreproachable, and lovers of wisdom, rejoicing in the
beautiful because it is beautiful, and considering that there is no other good
besides it . . . then our cities would be brimful of happiness. They would know
nothing of the things that cause grief and fear, but would be so filled with the
causes of joy and well being that there would not be a single moment in which
they would not lead a life full of joyful laughter; indeed the whole cycle of the
year would be a festival for them.1
Commenting on this passage in a remarkable book on just this aspect of

philosophy, Pierre Hadot writes:
In this passage from Philo of Alexandria, inspired by Stoicism, one of the

fundamental aspects of philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman eras comes
1. Philo Judaeus, “On the Special Laws,” 2:44–48, quoted in Pierre Hadot,
Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 264–265.

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WHAT JAMES’S PRAGMATISM OFFERS US 227
clearly to the forefront. During this period, philosophy was a way of life. This
is not only to say that it was a specific type of moral conduct; we can easily see
the role played in the passage from Philo by the contemplation of nature.
Rather, it means that philosophy was a mode of existing-in-the-world, which
had to be practiced at each instant, and the goal of which was to transform the
whole of an individual’s life.
For the ancients, the mere word philosophia—the love of wisdom—was
enough to express that conception of philosophy. In the Symposium, Plato had
shown that Socrates, symbol of the philosopher, could be identified with
Eros, the son of Poros (expedience) and of Penia (poverty). Eros lacked wis-
dom, but he did know how to acquire it. Philosophy thus took on the form
of an exercise of the thought, will, and the totality of one’s being, the goal of
which was to achieve a state practically inaccessible to mankind: wisdom.
Philosophy was a method of spiritual progress which demanded a radical con-
version and transformation of the individual’s way of being.2
William James was certainly not a Stoic, and he did not think that wis-
dom was practically inaccessible to mankind, but his aim, no less than that
of Philo, was to change our way of life as well as our way of thinking. That
is why he can begin his lectures with a tribute to a thinker whose outlook in
all other respects was diametrically opposed to his own: the Roman Catholic
G. K. Chesterton. What Chesterton and James share is the conviction that
philosophy “affects matters”; as Chesterton puts it, “The question is not
whether [philosophy] affects matters, but whether in the long run anything
else affects them.”3
Perhaps here we have one of the reasons why this lecture has received so
little discussion. In James’s own time, “philosopher” was coming to imply
“professor,” and as James says, “Whatever universe a professor believes in
must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse.”4 Of
course, James does not actually say that the professor is interested in lengthy
discourse and not in how people should live, but very often that is also the
case. For James, the priorities are quite different; he is not afraid of technical
argument, but his audience is decidedly not the professoriat. When he
2. Ibid., 265.
3. G. K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1986), 41.

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writes, “Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of hu-
man pursuits. It ‘bakes no bread’ as has been said, but it can inspire our souls
with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging,
its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can
get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world’s
perspectives,” he is addressing all of us.5 As William James Earle very well
put it, “James addressed himself to the people, not to other philosophers,
and he listened to the people to find out what life meant to them. He re-
spected not so much their common sense as their common feelings and
hopes and would not allow his philosophy to dismiss cavalierly that which
figured largely in the experiences of men.”6 In part, the professoriat has re-
sponded by discussing every aspect of James’s thought except his conception
of what philosophy is all about!
But there is a second reason for the virtual silence of James’s critics
about Lecture 1. What makes this lecture so provocative is its central the-
sis: that philosophy is, in the end, a matter of temperament. If that thesis
has not had the scorn poured upon it that has been poured upon, say,
James’s theory of truth—a theory that has been badly misrepresented7—
that is, perhaps, because it would be a little embarrassing to reply: “No,
James, philosophy is just a matter of rational arguments. After all, if that
is all philosophy is, it is a little mysterious why philosophical disagreement
should continue for so long! It is, in the end, undeniable that tempera-
ment must play a large role in the acceptance of philosophical views. One
might, of course, say that that is true but irrelevant; but that is a bit dan-
gerous. (A little bit like saying, ‘My views are dictated by reason itself; we
only have to appeal to temperament and similar psychological factors to
explain why others are not able to see that my views are the only reason-
able ones.’) Safer to ignore this whole question!”
But James’s talk of “temperament” must not be misunderstood (which is
probably what has happened). James is not saying that philosophy is just a
5. Ibid., 10–11.
6. William James Earle, “James, William,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New
York: Macmillan, 1967), 4:240–249, 241.
7. See Hilary Putnam, “Comment on Robert Brandom’s Paper,” in Hilary Putnam:
Pragmatism and Realism, ed. James Conant and Urszula M. Zeglen (London:
Routledge, 2002), 59–65.

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matter of subjective choice and that is the end of the matter. James also be-
lieves that there are better and worse temperaments. Temperaments too can
be criticized. But such criticism will not change people at once; to affect a
change in the “temper of a time” is a long slow process. And it is in that sort
of process that James is interested.
The Threat of Scientism and the Blindness of Rationalism
What concerns James, as it has concerned many other thinkers in the last
two centuries, is the way in which the growth in our understanding of na-
ture, the increase in the sophistication and power of our natural science, has
led to a loss of confidence in human values. “For a hundred and fifty years
past,” he writes, “the progress of science has seemed to mean the enlarge-
ment of the material universe and the diminution of man’s importance. The
result is what one may call the growth of naturalistic or positivistic feeling.
Man is no law-giver to nature, he is an absorber. She it is who stands firm;
he it is who must accommodate himself. Let him record truth, inhuman
though it be, and submit to it! The romantic spontaneity and courage are
gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert
by-products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and
treated forever as a case of ‘nothing but’—nothing but something else of a
quite inferior sort.”8 James admires the natural sciences, and particularly
admires their love of fact, their rejection of all pretensions to a priori or
transcendent sources of knowledge, their fallibilism and experimentalism,
but is dismayed at the materialism and the skepticism which he sees accom-
panying those admirable traits in the case of those whom he calls “the tough-
minded” (and whom we might today call the “scientistic”).
At the same time, James finds no acceptable alternative in the writings of
his idealist contemporaries, who seem to him to “dwell on so high a level of
abstraction that they never even try to come down.”9 And he sees even less
hope in traditional religion, which he describes as “fighting a slow retreat.”10
James employs a remarkable literary device to dramatize the extent to which
8. James, Pragmatism, 15.

9. Ibid., 16.
10. Ibid.

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the combination of traditional theism and philosophical abstraction are, in

his view, out of touch with the realities of life, with the problems that are
really there for us to see, and for us to do something about.
James’s device is to use as a hideous example, not a passage from one of
his idealist contemporaries nor a passage from a contemporary theologian,
but a passage from Leibnitz’s Theodicy (as if to say, “This temperament is al-
ways this out of touch with reality”). In this passage, it is assumed by Leibnitz
that the number of the eternally damned is infinitely greater, in our human
case, than the number of the saved, and Leibnitz reconciles this with God’s
goodness by arguing, first, that the number of saved on other planets may be
vastly greater than the number of damned and, second, that it is “fitting”
that “the damned draw to themselves ever new penalties by their continuing
sins.” James’s response is memorable:
Leibnitz’s feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me. It
is evident that no realistic image of the torment of a damned soul had ever
approached the portals of his mind. Nor had it occurred to him that the
smaller the number of ‘samples’ of the genus ‘lost soul’ whom God throws as
a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably grounded is the glory of the
blest. What he gives us is a cold literary exercise, whose cheerful substance
even hell-fire does not warm.
And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist philosophiz-
ing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The optimism of pres-
ent-day rationalism is just as shallow to the fact-loving mind.11
But the fireworks are not over. To Leibnitz’s cheerful theodicy, “whose
substance even hell-fire does not warm,” James juxtaposes a description of
one of the real evils in our own big cities: John Corcoran, a clerk, loses his
position through illness, and “during the period of idleness his scanty sav-
ings disappeared.” Corcoran is too weak for snow-shoveling—the only em-
ployment available. “Thoroughly discouraged, Corcoran returned to his
home late last night to find his wife and children without food and the no-
tice of dispossession on the door.”12 The next morning he committed suicide
by drinking carbolic acid. (One cannot help remarking that if the present
11. Ibid, 20.

12. Ibid.

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tendency to limit assistance to the poor continues in the United States, such
stories will again appear in our newspapers—if they print them.) And, as if
to remind us that the spirit of Leibnitz is still with us, James then quotes
Royce and Bradley to the effect that the Absolute (or “the eternal order”) is
richer for every evil in the temporal order.
The relation to our present-day concerns is clear. It is true that we no
longer have around as optimistic a form of rationalism as the absolute ideal-
ism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to justify the sorts of
evils James cites (although the celebration of ‘the free market’ as the solution
to all our problems does look suspiciously like a secularized version of
Leibnitz’s and Royce’s and Bradley’s theodicies). But the idea that it is, in
some sense, a ‘result of science’ that objective values do not exist is very pop-
ular in present-day Anglo-Saxon metaphysics.13 James promises us an out-
look that will enable us to hold on to both our love of fact and our confi-
dence in our ‘human values’, and to do so without so transcendentalizing
those values that they become ineffectual. While I do not believe that ‘the
answers’ can be found in any one place, or in the writings of any one philos-
opher or school of philosophy, I have argued elsewhere that the insights of
the great pragmatists are essential to developing such an outlook.14
13. See, for example, Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); and John Mackie, Ethics: Inventing
Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977).
14. Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), and Ethics without Ontology

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15
Varieties of Experience and

Pluralities of Perspective
Ruth Anna Putnam
VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE is James’s most widely read book. Yet

I find it to be extraordinarily complex. The phenomenon of religious experi-
ence is examined from at least three perspectives: that of the experimental
psychologist, that of the pragmatist, and that of the theist or, perhaps, polythe-
ist. The psychologist describes and classifies religious experiences, the pragma-
tist determines their significance or value, and the theist/polytheist reveals his
over-beliefs. In addition, James speaks to an audience of Protestant Christians,
and he speaks often in their language; nevertheless, he states explicitly that he
is unable “to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism.”1 Of
course, one must accept this disclaimer; it is amply supported by James’s other
writings. However, James was a New Englander, and in his time the culture of
New Englanders of his class was a Protestant culture. Without sharing the
dogmas of Protestantism, James shared the concepts and vocabulary typical of
Protestant Christianity. Not surprisingly, that language permeates his descrip-
tive account of religious experience. Indeed, what seems to him to be the reli-
gious experience par excellence is the conversion experience in the Protestant
sense, and conversely he writes of “the admirable congruity of Protestant the-
ology with the structure of the mind as shown in such experiences.”2
1. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in Works, 13:410.

2. Ibid., 198–199.

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VARIETIES OF EXPERIENCE AND PLURALITIES OF PERSPECTIVE 233
While Varieties speaks in four voices, it addresses only three questions. In

fact, in Lecture 1, James distinguishes only two questions: “What are the reli-
gious propensities?” and “What is their philosophical significance?” It will be
helpful to restate the second as two questions. First, what is the importance, or
meaning, or value of our religious propensities? This is the question of the prag-
matist, and James answers it in terms of the “fruits of religion.” But there is a
second question, a metaphysical or theological question, and this question
again has two parts. First, one asks whether there is any evidence for the exis-
tence of the divine and, if so, of what kind. James considers this to be the key
issue addressed in Varieties. The answer that he spells out in great detail is that
the evidence consists in religious experiences. Secondly, there are questions con-
cerning the nature of the divine; James refers to his responses to these questions
as his “over-beliefs.” The latter questions are barely addressed in Varieties; it is
not part of James’s self-imposed brief to answer them in these lectures. They are
addressed in A Pluralistic Universe and, more briefly, in Pragmatism.3
I shall assume, as an interpretive hypothesis, that in the context of James’s
work as a whole Varieties forms a transition from The Will to Believe to the
last chapter of Pragmatism and above all to A Pluralistic Universe.4 Very
briefly, this is the structure. In The Will to Believe, not only in the title essay
but in several others as well, James argues for our right to believe religious
hypotheses although we do so in advance of the evidence. In Varieties, James
provides evidence both for the claim that religious hypotheses are fit to be
debated by philosophers and for the claim that they have value; he also
raises, more briefly, the question of their truth. Finally in A Pluralistic
Universe James elaborates his own favored religious hypothesis. Because
Varieties provides a transition from a mere right to have over-beliefs to an
elaboration of James’s own over-beliefs, Varieties requires a multiplicity of
perspectives, hence a multiplicity of voices.
1. A Right to Believe
In the preface to The Will to Believe James describes the purpose of the title essay
and the three essays that follow as “defending the legitimacy of religious faith.”
3. James, A Pluralistic Universe, in Works, vol. 4, and Pragmatism, in Works, vol. 1.

4. James, The Will to Believe, in Works, vol. 6.

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They are addressed to young Christian men who have been taught, so he be-
lieves, “that there is something called scientific evidence by waiting upon which
they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in regard to truth.”5 James knew bet-
ter—no method could protect us from all error. Therefore, he “preached the
right of the individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk.”6
In his defense of that right James used the expression “religious hypothe-
sis.”7 It is an interesting expression. A hypothesis is for James any proposi-
tion that one might consider believing. A religious hypothesis is, then, a
hypothesis with a certain content. What is that content?
In “The Will to Believe” James wrote,
What then do we now mean by the religious hypothesis? Science says things
are; morality says some things are better than other things; and religion says
essentially two things.
First she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlap-
ping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak,
and say the final word. . . .
The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we
believe her first affirmation to be true.8
James says very little about the first hypothesis other than to point out that
for most of us “the universe is represented in our religions as having a per-
sonal form”; therefore, any person-to-person relation is possible between it
and us. Thus, just as a suspicious nature would keep us from making friends,
so “a snarling logicality” may deprive one of any opportunity to encounter
the divine. On the other hand, we may come to feel that we are “doing the
universe the deepest service we can” by believing that there are gods (yes, he
uses the plural here).9 Pragmatists hold that a belief is what one is prepared to
act on; hence religious persons will act on their religious beliefs, and James
assumes that they will act differently from agnostics or atheists and will, in
5. Ibid., 7.
6. Ibid., 8.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 29–30.
9. Ibid., 31.

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fact, act better. In Varieties he will subject this last assumption—that the reli-
gious person acts (morally) better—to empirical examination.
William James called himself a radical empiricist as early as 1896 in the
preface to The Will to Believe. There he defined empiricism as fallibilism, and
he made clear that his empiricism was radical, among other things, because
it extended to metaphysical doctrines. In other words, he would treat meta-
physical claims, and that includes religious claims, as he would treat scien-
tific claims—namely, as hypotheses subject to possible falsification.
Having said that, he immediately launched into an argument for plural-
ism. “Prima facie the world is a pluralism,” though we attempt to impose
unity on our experiences. “But absolute unity in spite of brilliant dashes in its
direction, still remains undiscovered, still remains a Grenzbegriff.” Finally, he
concluded, “He who takes for his hypothesis the notion that it [pluralism] is
the permanent form of the world is what I call a radical empiricist.” Here
pluralism means that there are “real possibilities, real indeterminations, real
beginnings, real ends, real evil, real crises, real catastrophes and escapes, a real
God, and a real moral life, just as common sense conceives these things.”10
Because the world is plural in this sense, there is no single point of view
from which the whole of the world can be apprehended. And, as he wrote so
eloquently in the preface to Talks to Teachers, “The practical consequence of
such a philosophy is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of
individuality—is, at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself
intolerant.”11
Pluralism, in other words, is itself not a single doctrine; it is in fact three
doctrines. First, there is the metaphysical doctrine concerning real possibili-
ties, etc. Second, there is what one might call the epistemological doctrine,
that there is no single point of view from which the whole plurality can be
apprehended. Finally, there is the moral doctrine of tolerance. The majority
of the essays in The Will to Believe present arguments in favor of a belief in
one item or another of the metaphysical doctrine.
In the preface to The Meaning of Truth, James gave another, though com-
patible, account of radical empiricism as consisting of a postulate, a state-
ment of fact, and a generalized conclusion. Here we are concerned only with
10. Ibid., 6.
11. James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology, in Works, 10:4.

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the postulate. “The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable
among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experi-
ence.”12 Since James, the philosopher, discusses the religious hypothesis, he
must show that it concerns things definable in terms drawn from experience.
In fact, by the time he wrote the preface to The Meaning of Truth in 1909 he
would have taken himself to have done so in Varieties. Of course, “definable”
is to be understood loosely; the pragmatists were not positivists.
2. The Evidence of Experience
Ralph Barton Perry, in his monumental The Thought and Character of

William James, tells us, “James once said: ‘I myself believe that the evidence
for God lies primarily in inner personal experience.’”13 We are, therefore, not
surprised to find him characterizing his aims in Varieties as follows:
The problem I have set myself is a hard one: first to defend (against all the
prejudices of my ‘class’) ‘experience’ against ‘philosophy’ as being the real
backbone of the world’s religious life—I mean prayer, guidance, and all that
sort of thing immediately and privately felt . . . and second, to make the hearer
or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all the
special manifestations of religion may have been absurd . . . yet the life of it as
a whole is mankind’s most important function.14
And he describes writing Varieties as “my religious act.” In other words,

James’s aim in Varieties is considerably wider than merely showing that the
religious hypothesis is discussible by philosophers. Nevertheless, in the con-
text of his life’s work, Varieties does play that role as well.
To achieve his aims, as already mentioned, James distinguishes two ques-
tions: the existential question, “What are the religious propensities of hu-
man beings?” and the spiritual question, “What is the value of these propen-

13. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 323.
14. Quoted from a letter to Miss Frances R. Morse, 12–13 April 1900, in James,
Varieties in Works, 13:530–531.

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sities?” David Lamberth has pointed out that the distinction before us is not
the familiar fact/value distinction but rather a distinction between a special
science on the one hand and metaphysics on the other.15 James explained the
distinction in the preface to The Principles of Psychology: “Every natural sci-
ence assumes certain data uncritically, and declines to challenge the elements
between which its own ‘laws’ obtain, and from which its own deductions are
carried on. . . . Of course the data themselves are discussible; but the discus-
sion of them (as of other elements) is called metaphysics.”16 What then are
the data, uncritically assumed, for the psychologist of religion?
The evidence for God lies in inner personal experience, but to find that
experience writ large enough for us to study it, we must turn to the writings
of individuals who found it worthwhile to make their inner experiences
public. James thought of such people as religious geniuses. Their religious
experiences, and only theirs, are presented in Varieties. The experiences of
ordinary religious persons are dismissed; James holds that they have their
religion second-hand and that it would profit us little to study their religious
lives. It is as if one were to say that research in the psychology of hearing
should be confined to subjects who have perfect pitch. The person with
perfect pitch can hear what the rest of us fail to hear; the religious genius
senses, at any rate at certain intense moments, the presence of the divine.
Are we acquainted with the varieties of musical experiences if we study only
the experiences of individuals with perfect pitch?
Charles Taylor in his tribute to James’s Varieties raises a related objection.
He points out that James belongs to one dominant strain in modern North
Atlantic Christianity, the strain that emphasizes personal commitment and
feelings. This causes him, according to Taylor, to misrepresent and under-
value the role of community, of ritual, of living according to divine com-
mandments in enabling people to find a relation to the divine. Taylor sum-
marizes this criticism: “What James can’t seem to accommodate is the
phenomenon of collective religious life, which is not just the result of (indi-
vidual) religious connections, but which in some sense constitutes or is that
15. David Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge:
16. James, The Principles of Psychology, 3 vols., in Works, 8:6.

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connection.”17 But this is too strong; James does not deny the phenomenon
of collective religious life, but he sees it as a secondary phenomenon. He
underestimates, perhaps, the role that religious institutions, lives lived in
religious communities, play in preparing the ground from which religious
experience springs. Nevertheless, and here I differ from Taylor, a connection
to or vivid awareness of the divine, whether experienced in solitude or during
a communal ritual, is an intensely private, particular, individual experience.
Be that as it may, the data of the psychologist of religion are “the feelings,
acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they appre-
hend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the di-
vine.”18 Here “the divine” is broadly understood. “The divine shall mean for
us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to
solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.”19 Here James appears
to include among the data not only the intense experiences he cites but also
events in the lives of those of us who have our religion second-hand. That
impression is reinforced when James, late in the Gifford lectures, returns to
characterizing religious life. Here prayer, defined as “every kind of inward
communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine,” is said to
be “the very soul and essence of religion.”20 However, conversation with the
divine, though an essential component of religion, cannot be, by itself, its
“very soul and essence.” The religious life does not consist solely in “feelings,
acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude”; it consists also in
their feelings and acts toward other human beings (and, in some cases, ani-
mals). James counts all of that among the “fruits,” as consequences rather
than as parts of religion. This seems to me too anemic a conception of the
religious life.
Here one might also mention, as Charles Taylor does, that James excludes
theology from the center of religious life. In so far as he takes himself to give
us the “essence” of religion, that complaint is certainly justified. But in the
context of James’s goal in Varieties it is not. Theology concerns what James
calls “over-beliefs,” what one is prepared to say about the nature of the di-
17. Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 24 (emphasis in original).
18. James, Varieties, in Works, 13:34.
19. Ibid., 39.
20. Ibid., 365.

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vine. James never denies that religious persons have over-beliefs. Perhaps
because his own over-beliefs are quite unconventional, he does not give suf-
ficient weight to the role that sacred writings play in the lives of many, per-
haps a majority of believers. But Varieties is not concerned with questions
concerning the nature of the divine; its subtitle proclaims it to be “A Study
of Human Nature” (my emphasis). Again, James lays claim to expertise only
in psychology. He is interested in the religious propensities of human beings,
and these, though not their overt manifestations, are quite independent of
theology.
While it may appear as if James had prejudged the question of evidence
for God’s existence when he defined religious experiences by reference to
apprehending oneself to stand in a relationship to the divine, this is not so
since all these apprehensions may be hallucinatory. However, while still deal-
ing with the existential—that is, narrowly psychological—investigation of
our religious propensities, James must open a door to the possibility of a
theistic explanation. James’s genius shows itself, in my opinion, in the man-
ner in which he accomplishes this difficult task.
Although James provides accounts of various kinds of religious experi-
ences, two sorts stand out: the conversion experiences of twice-born
Protestant Christians and the mystical experiences of members of various
faith communities. In both cases James, the psychologist, draws attention to
what religious states of consciousness have in common with other, nonreli-
gious states. It is a general thesis of James’s work that religious love is a kind
of love, religious fear a kind of fear, and religious experience a kind of expe-
rience. In other words, religious experiences are to be looked at from an
empiricist, not a theological perspective.
Considering conversion experiences, James appeals to the then recent
discovery that individuals are sometimes responsive in their conscious be-
havior, emotions, and beliefs to matters of which they have not been even
marginally aware. James points out that in the case of posthypnotic sug-
gestion, we create and hence know the subliminal source of the behavior.
In the case of hysteric patients psychoanalytic techniques will bring the
disturbing memories to consciousness and thus effect a cure. James sug-
gests then that the explanation of other pathological phenomena may also
be found in the subconscious but that much research will be required to

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verify this hypothesis, in which research “the religious experiences of man

must play their part.”21
Of course, this is not nor is it meant to be a “proof ” of the existence of
God; James has no truck with proofs. But comparing religious experiences
to pathological states does not even look like a proof; in fact, at first sight it
looks like debunking. But James does not intend to debunk religion. Even
concerning the various creeds for which he has little patience, he urges “ten-
derness and tolerance as long as they are not intolerant themselves.”22 What
then is the point of introducing subconscious influences, of classifying reli-
gious experiences with hysteria (in the technical sense) and with posthyp-
notic suggestion? (By the way, people who get converted at revivals turn out
to be good hypnotic subjects!) The point is to open the door to the possibility
of divine intervention in an individual’s ordinary mental life. James writes,
“But just as our primary wide-awake consciousness throws open our senses
to the touch of things material, so it is logically conceivable that if there be
higher spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological condi-
tion of their doing so might be our possession of a subconscious region
which alone should yield access to them.”23
When, after many lectures on saintliness and its value, James returns to
the question of evidence, he examines mystical states. These experiences are
ineffable in the sense that states of feeling are ineffable. Yet these ineffable
states are experienced as states of knowing; they are, in other words, peculiar
states of consciousness. Once again, James notes that these states of con-
sciousness belong to a class to which various pathological states also belong
(e.g., states induced by nitrous oxide or moderate use of alcohol). His own
experiments with nitrous oxide, James tells us, have convinced him that
“normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but
one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the
filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness, entirely differ-
ent.”24 The subconscious states mentioned in connection with conversion
experiences as possible conduits for possible divine influences are, of course,
also such “potential forms of consciousness.”
21. Ibid., 192.

22. Ibid., 405.
24. Ibid., 307–308.

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While mystical states carry utter conviction for those who experience
them, they have no claims on the rest of us. “But,” James notes, “the higher
ones among them point in directions to which the religious sentiments even
of non-mystical men incline. They tell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vast-
ness, of union, of safety, and of rest. They offer us hypotheses, hypotheses
which we may voluntarily ignore, but which as thinkers we cannot possibly
upset. The supernaturalism and optimism to which they would persuade us
may, interpreted in one way or another, be after all the truest of insights into
the meaning of life.”25 More generally, James compares mystics to travelers
to distant shores. We would be foolish, he thinks, to reject the travelers’ tales
out of hand; we would be equally foolish not to take seriously the mystics’
testimony concerning “the actual existence of a higher world with which our
world is in relation.”26
Here I would like to emphasize (as James himself does) the word “hy-
potheses.” The upshot of the examination of the psychological data is just
this: religious hypotheses are discussible among empiricist philosophers be-
cause they concern, indeed, “things definable in terms drawn from experi-
ence.” They are individuals’ responses to certain experiences, experiences we
call “religious” because their object is the divine, just as we call other experi-
ences “musical” because their object is music. Whether these experiences are
veridical is a separate question, to which we must now turn.
3. Reflecting on the Evidence
James was, I think, a deeply religious person, although an unconventional

one. Throughout Varieties one senses an inner conflict; James wants to con-
tribute to a science of religion that is in every sense a science, and yet, as we
noted above, writing Varieties was for him a religious act. Again, one great
virtue he finds in religion is that, unlike science, it does not abstract. Religion
deals with the most private moments of individuals, hence with the very
core of reality. Yet he looks for the common core in religious experience, and
for the common core in religious beliefs; the results turn out to be either
25. Ibid., 339.

26. Ibid., 384.

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parochial or lifeless generalities. Of course, he rejects the very idea of offer-

ing proofs for the existence of God—he debunks all known philosophical
proofs in a few breathtaking pages. But he wants to say more than that the
religious hypothesis is discussible, more than that we have a right to believe
it, he wants to present noncoercive reasons, but reasons nonetheless in its
favor.
In the essay “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” James gives one
such reason, saying that
in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to our moral energy falls
short of its maximal stimulating power. Life, to be sure, is even in such a
world a genuinely ethical symphony; but is played in the compass of a couple
of poor octaves. . . . When, however, we believe that a God is there, and that
he is one of the claimants, the infinite perspective opens out. The scale of the
symphony is incalculably prolonged.27
This is an inspiring metaphor, but what exactly does religion add to the
nonreligious moral life? James responds in the concluding Gifford Lecture:
“Taking creeds and faith-state together, as forming ‘religions’ and treating
these as purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question of
their ‘truth,’ we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence on
action and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological
functions of mankind.”28 The essence of religion lies, for James, in the inter-
dependence of religious emotions and the conduct they inspire. The emo-
tions provoked by religious experiences and to a lesser extent by prayer are
invigorating; they overcome debilitating melancholy, they add a zest to life.
At the very least, then, religion is good for the religious individual. Moreover,
by way of the conduct it inspires, it is also good for humanity at large for,
James concludes in his careful investigation into the fruits of saintliness, “the
saintly qualities are indispensable for the world’s welfare.”29
Today one hesitates to agree with this enthusiastic moral endorsement of
religion—that is, of the conduct religious faith inspires. Religiously inspired
Works, 6:141–162, 160.
29. Ibid., 299.

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violence has become part of the daily news if not of our own lives. Do we
have reasons to regard the violence as an aberration and only the deeds of
loving kindness as genuinely religious? Religious strife and religious warfare
are not modern inventions; how could James conclude that on the whole
religion is good for humanity? Did he forget about the Crusades, about the
Thirty Years’ War, etc.? I do not think so. James believed in progress, partic-
ularly in moral progress. He was a tireless advocate of tolerance, and he be-
lieved, with some justification, that human beings were indeed becoming
more and more tolerant, especially concerning theological questions. It was,
therefore, not unreasonable to believe that the practical effects of religion
would become increasingly exclusively moral effects. In some form or other
all the major religions preach compassion or love of one’s neighbor or con-
cern for the poor and downtrodden. In so far as they inspire the correspond-
ing conduct, James’s positive judgment is surely justified. However, the ef-
fects of religious beliefs, good or bad, compassionate or cruel, appear to be
quite independent of their truth.
What then can be said about the truth of religion? What, precisely, is the
hypothesis we are to investigate? What is the common core of all particular
creeds? Here is one fairly brief statement: “Religion, wherever it is an active
thing, involves a belief in ideal presences, and a belief that in our prayerful
communion with them, real work is done, and something real comes to
pass.”30 A few pages later, James formulates the common core of all religions as
“a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand” and as “a
sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connexion with
the higher powers.”31 Notice that the second quotation speaks of a sense (i.e.,
a rather inchoate awareness) rather than a well-articulated belief, as does the
first. The second speaks of the common core of religious experiences while the
first speaks of the common core of the creeds, the various over-beliefs that al-
most inevitably accompany an individual’s religious feelings.
But let us concentrate on the experience. An experience, James tells us,
consists of a field of consciousness, an object of attention, an attitude toward
that object, and a sense of the self that has the attitude. In ordinary waking
life, we are hardly aware of events at the margins of the fields and entirely
30. Ibid., 386.

31. Ibid., 400.

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unaware of what goes on beyond the margins, though what goes on there
may exert an influence on our conscious awareness and behavior. In con-
trast, James writes, “In persons deep in the religious life, as we have now
abundantly seen—and this is my conclusion—the door into this region [the
subconscious] seems unusually wide open; at any rate, experiences making
their entrance through that door have had emphatic influence in shaping
religious history.”32
Consider then the experience of being aware of one’s own ‘wrongness’ in
the religious sense. One’s higher self is aware of what’s wrong with one’s lower
self, and one becomes reconciled, or ‘saved’, when one identifies with one’s
higher self. According to James, this happens as follows. “He becomes conscious
that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same
quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep
in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when
all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.” 33 The question of the truth
of religion boils down, then, to the question whether the ‘MORE’ really ex-
ists or is a mere fancy, and if it does exist, how we are in contact with it.
At this point it comes as no surprise to learn that James finds the subcon-
scious self made to order. He seeks an explanation of religious experience
that is acceptable to science. Psychologists agree that there is a wider subcon-
scious self, and that what happens in the subconscious can have real effects
on the conscious self. James’s appeal to the subconscious is therefore scientif-
ically respectable. At the same time, it is at least possible that events in the
subconscious can be affected by forces external to it as well as to the con-
scious self. James’s image of the conscious self as surrounded by the subcon-
scious as by a sea enables him to wonder what is on the farther shore, and
thus to introduce his own over-beliefs. Just where the over-beliefs enter is,
however, less clear than one might wish it to be.
Consider James’s own summing up of the findings of psychology.
“Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common
and generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a
wider self through which saving experiences come, a positive content of reli-
32. Ibid., 381.

33. Ibid., 400.

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gious experience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far
as it goes.”34
But is it a fact that “the conscious person is continuous with a wider self
through which saving experiences come?” Or is this already an over-belief?
Let us grant that the conscious self is embedded in a wider subconscious self;
let us grant even that our impulses to be morally better arise in that wider
self. Still, we must admit that our impulses to be worse also arise there. That
wider self is simply too limited as well as too fragmented to be “a wider self
through which saving experiences come.” Can the moral energy, the zest for
living the morally strenuous life, not to mention the sense of being ‘saved’
come from being in contact merely with one’s own subconscious? Or if it
can, what is the input into the subconscious that produces these effects? This
question provides James the opportunity to elaborate the image of the sub-
conscious as a sea. He now conceives of the subconscious as the near shore
of a sea on whose far shore is God, or the Higher Powers. That is a daring
hypothesis. James has suggested a way (a mechanism) by which something
other and higher than one’s self could influence the conscious self if there is
such a being.
In his final lecture of Pragmatism, “Pragmatism and Religion,” James said,
“I have written a book on men’s religious experience, which on the whole has
been regarded as making for the reality of God.”35 That suggests that he takes
himself to have done more—and that others take him to have done more—
than merely uncover a possible mechanism for human-divine communica-
tion. Rather, suggesting such a mechanism is taken to support the claim that
such communication takes place. But to claim that such communication
takes place is to accept the reality of the divine. It is to accept the under-
standing of certain quite common experiences as indeed religious experi-
ences, as NOT being hallucinatory. This seems to me to be an over-belief,
but when James speaks of over-beliefs, he seems to mean beliefs concerning
the nature rather than the mere existence of the divine.


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4. Conclusion
What then are James’s own over-beliefs? They are, as is well known, quite
unconventional. “The gods we stand by,” he wrote, “are the gods we need
and can use.”36 He needed gods to provide moral energy, a zest for life. For
him that meant not the certainty but the chance of ‘salvation’ for the world.
In the postscript he maintained, “Meanwhile the practical needs and experi-
ence of religion seem to me to be sufficiently met by the belief that beyond
each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power
which is friendly to him and to his ideals.”37 His characterizations of that
larger power vary. In the postscript he continues, “Anything larger will do, if
only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it
need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more
godlike self, . . . and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such
selves.”38 In Pragmatism he tells us that religious individuals of the pluralistic
type have “always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter pares, in the
midst of all the shapers of the great world’s fate.”39 And in A Pluralistic
Universe he maintains that
all the evidence we have seems to me to sweep us very strongly towards the
belief in some form of superhuman life with which we may, unknown to
ourselves, be co-conscious. . . . The outlines of the superhuman consciousness
thus made probable must remain, however, very vague, and the number of
functionally distinct ‘selves’ it comports and carries has to be left entirely
problematic.
Finally, he holds that the only escape from the problem of evil is to “assume
that the superhuman consciousness, however vast it may be, has itself an
external environment, and consequently is finite.”40
I find James’s conception of a deity quite appealing and inspiring. But we
must recognize that it is just that, a conception. The wealth of evidence pre-

37. Ibid., 413.
38. Ibid.
40. James, A Pluralistic Universe, in Works, 4:140.

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sented in Varieties does not support one over-belief over another. James, the
pluralist, should have been pleased with that.
I began by recalling that The Varieties of Religious Experience is James’s
most widely read work. I added that it is complex. I have tried to place it in
the wider context of James’s work. I wish to conclude by recalling James’s
own aim in the Gifford Lectures—namely, to show that experience, not
philosophy, is “the real backbone of the world’s religious life.” In the wider
context of pragmatism’s struggle against too narrow a conception of experi-
ence, The Varieties of Religious Experience plays an indispensable role.

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16
William James on Religion
Ruth Anna Putnam
WILLIAM JAMES’S (1842–1910) philosophy of religion is deeply embedded

in his radical empiricism and in his pragmatism. I cannot present James’s
arguments for these views here; I shall state some of the key elements as they
become relevant to James’s developing views in the philosophy of religion.
At the turn of the twentieth century, as again at the turn of the twenty-first,
science and religion—beliefs resulting from empirical methods of inquiry
and faith—appeared to be in conflict, especially for philosophers and other
reflective persons. For James this conflict is illusory; he will attempt to show
that empiricism as he understands it is compatible with religion as he under-
stands that.
Relatively early in his philosophical career James argued repeatedly for
the intellectual legitimacy of religious belief. Later, in his best-known, most
widely read book, The Varieties of Religious Experience (delivered as the
Gifford Lectures in 1901–1902), he offered accounts of religious experiences
as evidence for the existence of the divine and ends with some philosophical
reflections. Some years later, in Pragmatism (delivered as Lowell Lectures in
1906), he offered pragmatism as a pluralistic and melioristic (philosophy of )
religion, but, as in Varieties, he devotes only one lecture to this subject. Only
late in his life, in A Pluralistic Universe (delivered as Hilbert Lectures in
1908), did he develop his philosophy of religion in detail, arguing specifi-
cally against the reigning absolute idealism of his time but rejecting also
conventional theism.

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WILLIAM JAMES ON RELIGION 249
I shall take up these issues in historical sequence. Some additional prelim-

inary remarks are, however, in order. In 1870, James experienced a severe
psychological crisis from which he recovered when the writings of the French
philosopher Renouvier persuaded him that humans have free will.
Henceforth any metaphysical conception and a fortiori any philosophy of
religion that James can accept must be compatible with our having free will.
Free will would not exist in a purely material world, and it would be mean-
ingless in a world whose future (or whose ultimate solution, to use James’s
language) is guaranteed. James often uses such traditional Christian, specif-
ically Protestant, expressions, although he stated explicitly that he was not a
Christian. Finally, James distinguished between the religion of common
people and the philosophy of religion without ever saying how these relate,
but he mentions his interpretation of the former when it seems to agree with
his own philosophical religious views.
A Defense of Faith
In one of his earliest philosophical writings, “The Sentiment of Rationality,”

James considers what one wants from a world view.1 One wants it to enable
one to go on thinking, living, and acting in the face of confusion, suffering,
and other evil—in short, to make sense of our experiences. When it does so,
we feel that the world is rational, that we are at home in the universe. Later,
in A Pluralistic Universe, he found rationality to be too ambiguous a concept
and spoke instead of a feeling of intimacy with the universe.2
In “Reflex Action and Theism” James sets himself the task of “showing
that a God, whether existent or not, is at all events the kind of being which,
if he did exist, would form the most adequate possible object for minds framed
like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the universe. . . . Anything
short of God is not rational, anything more than God is not possible.”3 God, to
put it very simply, is put forward as the answer to the most general, most
universal question, the final answer to our incessant “Why?” But what was
James’s concept of God in the 1890s?
1. James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in Essays in Philosophy, in Works, 5:32–64.

2. James, A Pluralistic Universe, in Works, vol. 4.
3. James, “Reflex Action and Theism,” in The Will to Believe, in Works, 6:90–113, 93.

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He writes, “First, it is essential that God be conceived as the deepest

power in the universe, and, second, he must be conceived under the form of
a mental personality.” James claims that the divine personality and ours re-
semble each other in this, “that both have purposes for which they care, and
each can hear the other’s call.”4 This conception of the deity leaves room for
free will and provides an active role for us.
James’s most famous early essay in the philosophy of religion is his misti-
tled essay “The Will to Believe”—mistitled because what he defends, in op-
position to religious skeptics, is not our will but our right to believe in “the
religious hypothesis” in advance of the evidence.5 James begins by pointing
out that there are many common situations in which we are forced to choose
between two hypotheses, both of which have a certain appeal for us and in
which the consequences of our choice are serious. For example, one meets a
person who makes friendly overtures. One can either assume (believe) that
this person is worth knowing and respond accordingly, or one can be suspi-
cious, afraid of finding, on closer acquaintance, that the person is boring or
rude, and refuse to respond to the overtures. Choosing in such a situation is
unavoidable and certainly intellectually respectable, and one’s choice will
have far-reaching consequences. Moreover, acting on one’s choice may pro-
duce the evidence one now lacks (e.g., one may end up with a wonderful
new friend). James maintains that those of us tempted by the “religious hy-
pothesis” find ourselves in just such a situation. Just as there is nothing intel-
lectually disreputable in responding positively to friendly overtures, so, says
James, there is nothing disreputable in affirming the religious hypothesis.
That hypothesis, according to James, affirms, first, that good will triumph
over evil (or, at least, that it may if we and the divine powers cooperate) and,
second, that “we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to
be true,” that is, if we act so as to contribute to the triumph of good over
evil.6 So formulated, the religious hypothesis seems clearly to be preferred
over the agnostic alternative, but I wonder whether agnostics would formu-
late it that way. In any case, while James ignored religious experiences in
these early writings, he was soon to consider their evidentiary status.
4. Ibid., 97–98.
5. James, “The Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe, in Works, vol. 6.
6. Ibid., 29–30.

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The Evidence
Writing to his friend Frances Morse, James described his task in Varieties of
Religious Experience as follows:
The problem I have set myself is a hard one: first to defend (against all the
prejudices of my ‘class’) ‘experience’ against ‘philosophy’ as being the real
backbone of the world’s religious life—I mean prayer, guidance, and all that
sort of thing immediately and privately felt . . . and second, to make the
hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all
the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd . . . yet the life of
it as a whole is mankind’s most important function.7
The first task, then, is a task for a psychologist of religion, and as such
James sets before us numerous accounts of the conversion experiences of
twice-born Protestants and of mystical experiences by members of various
faith communities. James has been criticized for giving a distorted picture of
religious life, leaving out all social and ritual aspects as well as the religious
lives of ordinary believers. But James does not claim to paint a complete
picture; he is interested only in those aspects of the religious life that might
be evidentiary for religious hypotheses. Of course, it remains an open ques-
tion whether those experiences are veridical.
James points to numerous similarities between religious experiences and
certain other experiences, between religious ideas and other ideas, between
religious feelings and other feelings. Thus he points out that in so far as reli-
gious belief is belief in an unseen order, it is just like our belief in any other
abstraction. We find our way in the universe of concrete objects by the help
of such abstract concepts as space, time, causality, thing, etc.; just so we find
our way morally by the help of such concepts as God, freedom, soul, justice,
etc. These similarities serve to show that religious beliefs are, at any rate,
beliefs like other beliefs, and religious concepts are concepts like other con-
cepts serving the same sort of function.
Next, James will show how religious experiences fit into a general psycho-
logical account of our mental lives. We are at any moment bombarded by a
7. William James, The Letters of William James, 2 vols., ed. Henry James Jr. (Boston:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 2:127.

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multitude of sensations, a multitude that would be utterly confusing were

we to pay attention to all of them equally; fortunately, our interests will fo-
cus our attention, and our concepts will impose an order on the objects of
our attention. We are, then, at every moment conscious of a ‘field’. Its center
is the center of our attention, but we are aware, though less clearly, of what
surrounds that center. The field shades off toward its margins, and these are
not clearly demarcated. The field at any given time flows out of its predeces-
sor and into its successor; what is marginal at one moment may determine
the center of attention for the next, and so on.
James remarks that psychology took a giant step forward in 1886 with
the discovery that, in some subjects, there are signs of the influence on
consciousness of extramarginal memories, thoughts, and feelings.
Hypnotic suggestion and hysteria (in the technical sense) are explained by
reference to incursions of the transmarginal into the conscious field, and
James believes that the idea of irruptions of subliminal material into the
conscious field will also explain certain phenomena of religious life such as
sudden conversions. Just as in a wide-awake state our senses are a condi-
tion of our apprehending physical objects, writes James, “so it is logically
conceivable that if there be higher spiritual agencies that can directly touch
us, the psychological condition of their doing so might be our possession
of a subconscious region which alone should yield access to them.”8
Noticing similarities between mystic states and states of intoxication by
alcohol or nitrous oxide, James concludes:
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but

one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the
filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
. . . No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these
other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.9
In fact James imagines the conscious self as surrounded by a sea of the

subconscious, a “MORE” as he calls it. That image invites speculation con-
8. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in Works, 13:197 (emphasis in

original).
9. Ibid., 307–308.

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cerning the farther shore, what James calls over-beliefs, the details of the
various religions.
James has no interest in theologies; he takes himself to have established
only this:
Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and

generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider
self through which saving experiences come, a positive content of religious expe-
rience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far as it goes.10
But surely this claims too much. James has indeed suggested a mecha-
nism by which a higher being could influence the self if there is such a being,
but the “wider self “ might indeed be no more than the conscious self plus
its subconscious. However, James took himself to have done more, for, refer-
ring to Varieties, he wrote some years later that the book “on the whole has
been taken to make for the reality of God.”11 Before moving on to James’s
final and carefully worked-out over-beliefs, let us take a brief look at prag-
matism as a philosophy of religion.
Pragmatism as a Meliorism
The years after the publication of Varieties were extraordinarily productive.

James developed his theory of pure experience in a series of papers published
in the Journal of Philosophy and posthumously in the volume Essays in Radical
Empiricism.12 He presented and published the lectures on pragmatism.13 He
left voluminous manuscripts testifying to his attempts to formulate his phi-
losophy and to meet objections. Finally, he gave the Hibbert Lectures on
“The Present Situation in Philosophy” and published them under the title A
Pluralistic Universe.14 Out of this wealth of material, I can only select what
bears directly on James’s understanding of the divine and our relation to it.

12. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, in Works, vol. 3.
13. James, Pragmatism, in Works, vol. 1.
14. James, A Pluralistic Universe in Works, vol. 4.

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In the first lecture in Pragmatism, James offers pragmatism as a solution

to a dilemma that he thought was faced by anyone interested in philosophy
at the beginning of the twentieth century. Philosophy offers a choice, he
said, between an empiricism that leaves no room for religion (i.e., material-
ism) and a rationalism that leaves no room for experience (i.e., absolute
idealism). James finds both views unacceptable because neither allows for
the intimacy he seeks; neither, however logical and even beautiful it may be,
lets loose our moral energy; neither leaves room for free will. In contrast, an
empiricism that includes religious experiences under the rubric “experience,”
as pragmatism does, leaves room for a religion that is compatible with free
will.
James generally dismisses materialism without argument; he wrestles in-
tellectually as well as, I suspect, emotionally with absolute idealism, so ably
defended by his colleague and friend Josiah Royce as well as by numerous
others. In order to weaken the claims of absolute idealism, James devoted
one of the Pragmatism lectures to the problem of the “One and the Many,”
of which he said that it is the most central problem in philosophy. Thus he
asks what might be meant by the claim that the world is one. Of the many
interpretations he considers I shall mention only unity of purpose. Clearly,
there are examples of unity of purpose: people, organizations, even nations
cooperate to achieve common goals, but just as often they have conflicting
goals and work against each other. James hopes, as one must, that there will
be more cooperation and less strife in the future. But when theologians
speak of unity of purpose, James claims, they mean that God has one great
purpose that everything in the world serves. It should come as no surprise
that James is outraged. “The scale of evil actually in sight defies all human
tolerance,” but idealist philosophers can do no better than finding God’s
ways mysterious. James adds, “A God who can relish such superfluities of
horror is no God for human beings to appeal to. . . . In other words the
‘Absolute’ with his one purpose, is not the man-like God of common peo-
ple.”15 The Absolute of the philosophers is the All-Knower. James quotes his
colleague Josiah Royce, “God’s consciousness forms in its wholeness one
luminous transparent conscious moment.”16 Empiricists, in contrast, hold

16. Josiah Royce, The Conception of God (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 292.

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that while anything that gets known by someone gets known together with
something else, there may be many knowers, and even the greatest knowl-
edge may not be of everything.17
What then is the upshot of Pragmatism? It is a ringing affirmation of plu-
ralism. It is the view, which he also calls moralistic, that the ‘salvation’ of the
universe, the ultimate triumph of good over evil, is not a foregone conclu-
sion; it depends on what each of us contributes to that cause. Against the
monotheistic affirmations of Christianity, and I may add here Judaism and
Islam, James asserts,
Their words may have sounded monistic when they said, “there is no God but
God”; but the original polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly and
vaguely sublimated itself into monotheism, and monotheism itself, so far as it
was religious and not a scheme of classroom instruction for the metaphysi-
cians, has always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter pares, in the
midst of all the shapers of the great worldʼs fate.
We may, I think, take this to be a confession of faith, for a few lines later he
writes, “I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest
form of experience extant in the universe.”18
Over-Beliefs
James’s goal in A Pluralistic Universe is to defend an empiricist, pluralistic pan-

theism. He rejects materialism virtually without argument. Pantheism makes
intimacy with the universe impossible. But he rejects conventional atheism,
the idea of a God who is wholly other than us for the same reason; there can
be no two-way relation between us and such a being. Surprisingly, James as-
sumes that his audience agrees with him up to this point. He and they are left,
then, with just two alternatives: absolute idealism and James’s own pluralism.
For both there is a superhuman consciousness or there are superhuman con-
sciousnesses of which human consciousnesses are parts. But for the absolute
idealists there is one all-enveloping consciousness, and it alone and its total

18. Ibid., 143.

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thought are fully real. The finite entities we know and our finite thoughts exist
only because they are thought by the Absolute. In James’s language, for abso-
lute idealism reality exists fully only in the “all-form.” In contrast, James rejects
the idea of the Absolute and prefers to think of reality as existing in the “each-
form.” His most important reason, I believe, is this. From an absolutist point
of view, what we experience as evil—for example, human suffering—is in the
larger picture a good. For James, on the other hand, there are real evils, and it
is our task to get rid of them. To put it another way, since the Absolute is per-
fect and what it thinks is alone real, and since the Absolute does not suffer,
suffering is not real for absolute idealists. James takes it that absolute idealism
gives us a permanent moral vacation: since suffering is not real, we are under
no obligation to alleviate it. James, speaking as a psychologist, recognizes the
need for occasional moral holidays, but does not need absolutism to authorize
them, and he has overwhelming reasons to reject it.
Let us then turn to James’s views concerning superhuman forms of con-
sciousness. In one of his unpublished and unfinished manuscripts, James
defends panpsychism and points out its affinity for pantheism:
As my body has a conscious soul, I am willing to assume that a conscious soul

is connected with other bodies, even down to the smallest material things
which I suppose to exist. I am willing also to believe that there exist larger
souls than my own, whether connected or disconnected with the larger mate-
rial aggregations. The existence of such larger souls may be called a theological
question. . . . But I do not believe, picturing the whole as I do, that even if a
supreme soul exists, it embraces all the details of the universe in a single abso-
lute act either of thought or of will. In other words, I disbelieve in the omni-
science of the deity and in his omnipotence as well. The facts of struggle seem
too deeply characteristic of the whole frame of things for me not to suspect
that hindrance & experiment go all the way through.19
James is, of course, right in thinking that once one accepts panpsychism,
there is no reason to stop with the human body as the location of conscious-
ness. If molecules can have a rudimentary consciousness, may not the earth
have a larger consciousness? This was in fact the view of James’s contempo-
rary Gustav Theodor Fechner, a view James found attractive. Finally, by in-
19. James, Manuscripts, Essays and Notes, in Works, 17:5.

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sisting on the finitude of even the highest, most enveloping consciousness,

James announces, once again, his opposition to absolute idealism as well as
to scholastic theism. He thought, however, that the “common man” shares
his belief that God is finite and insists, “If it should prove probable that the
absolute does not exist, it will not follow in the slightest degree that a God
like that of David, Isaiah and Jesus may not exist, or may not be the most
important existence in the universe for us to acknowledge.”20
James’s panpsychism and his pantheism fit well with his ontology of
pure experience. According to James, the ultimate elements of reality, the
pure experiences, are neutral, neither physical nor mental, but capable of
relating to one another in such a way as to form streams of consciousness
or to relate in different ways to form physical objects. A pure experience
can be part of more than one stream, and of both physical and mental
streams at the same time. Thus my seeing a pen is the pen’s being seen by
me—an event in both streams. More immediately relevant is the possibil-
ity of one stream of consciousness being part of another larger one. This
possibility corresponds to James’s version of pantheism. Let us recall his
conclusion at the end of Varieties, that “the conscious person is continuous
with a wider self through which saving experiences come.”21 He ascribes to
Fechner the view that each of us is a sense organ of the earth soul and that
“it absorbs our perceptions, just as they occur, in to its larger sphere of
knowledge, and combines them with the other data there.”22 Yet, while
James wants to argue for what I shall call, for short, an over-soul, he also
wants to retain his own individuality and autonomy. Thus arises the prob-
lem of the compounding of consciousness, the question whether “states of
consciousness, so called, can separate and combine themselves freely, and
keep their own identity unchanged while forming parts of simultaneous
fields of experience of wider scope.”23
Suppose then you are aware of a bird in a tree. Upon moving your head,
you no longer have the bird in your field of vision, but you are now aware of
a cat under the same tree. Stepping back a bit, you enlarge your field of vi-
sion and now are aware of a bird in a tree and a cat sitting under the tree.

23. Ibid., 83.

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Obviously this is a third awareness, different from either of the preceding

two, but how is it related to them? In his monumental Principles of Psychology,
James held that the bird-in-a-tree awareness and the cat-under-a-tree aware-
ness are not part of the bird-in-a-tree-and-cat-under-the-tree awareness, that
the latter is, so to speak, entirely new, though of the same objects: the cat,
the tree, and the bird. The alternative view holds that the cat-under-the tree
awareness and the bird-in-the-tree awareness are literally parts of the cat-
under-the-tree-and-bird-in-the-tree awareness just as the cat and the bird
and the tree are parts of the scene of which you are aware; call this com-
pounding of consciousness. A theistic God, James holds, would be aware of
us in the first way, but absolute idealism requires our thoughts to be literally
parts of the Absolute. But that leaves open the question how such com-
pounding of consciousness is possible. How can the Absolute compound
our several finite consciousnesses of small parts of the universe and vast ig-
norance into its consciousness of the whole universe as one fact? How can it
compound itself out of us? Unfortunately, James’s inability to answer this
question is an objection not only to absolute idealism but also, alas, to any
higher enveloping consciousness (e.g., Fechner’s earth soul). It leaves us with
the god of theism.
But the view that complex psychic states succeed upon the simpler
states that we erroneously call their parts seems now also untenable. For,
according to that view, the later, more complex states have the same func-
tion (know the same bird, cat, and tree) as the earlier, simpler states, and
that seems to James an unintelligible miracle. Thus he finds himself con-
fronted by a trilemma: (a) give up his lifelong opposition to a mental sub-
stance—in other words, “bring back scholasticism and common sense” or
(b) “confess the solution of the problem impossible” and then either (i)
“give up my intellectualistic logic” or (ii) “face the fact that life is logically
irrational.” But talk of souls, James claims, does not explain anything. So,
facing dilemma (b), he finds himself “compelled to give up the logic.” I
cannot here explain this rather mysterious assertion. Suffice it to say that
James does not abandon ordinary logic for everyday or scientific purposes;
he rejects certain “logical” principles that were said, in his day, to give in-
sight into reality.24
24. Ibid., 95, 96.

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Here we need to remember that James is an empiricist; he will appeal to

experience, and he will speak only of probabilities. The religious experiences
that he studied in The Varieties of Religious Experience, he points out, could
not have been predicted from ordinary experience. Thus they “suggest” (this
is James’s cautious expression) that our ordinary natural experience is only a
part of human experience. Those who have religious experiences are inclined
to believe that their consciousness is continuous with a “wider self from
which saving experiences flow in.”25 And repeated experiences will for them
transform belief into certainty. For James, the experiences—that is, the re-
ports of them—count as empirical verification of Fechner’s idea, mentioned
above, of an earth soul.
But why stop with an earth soul? Why not a soul of the galaxy? Why not a
soul of the cosmos, that is, the Absolute? Because all the difficulties, paradoxes,
and perplexities already considered would still hold—in particular, the prob-
lem of evil and the denial of free will. The only escape, says James, is to affirm
pluralism: “to accept, along with the superhuman consciousness, the notion
that it is not all-embracing—the notion, in other words, that there is a God,
but that he is finite, either in power or knowledge, or in both at once.”26 This,
James claims, has been the view of the common man all along.
All along James has pointed out that there is a difference between reli-
gion—that is, the common person’s faith—and philosophy of religion. So
when he now claims that his own philosophy of religion is the view of the
common believer, he is saying at least this: whatever speaks for his philo-
sophical position speaks also for the common faith, while the arguments
against the Absolute leave the common faith undisturbed.
James concludes,
Thus does foreignness get banished from the world, and far more so when we
take the system pluralistically than when we take it monistically. We are in-
deed internal parts of God and not external creations, on any reading of the
panpsychic system. Yet because God is not the absolute, but is himself a part
when the system is conceived pluralistically, his functions can be taken as not
25. Ibid., 139.

26. Ibid., 141.

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wholly dissimilar to those of other smaller parts—as similar to our functions

consequently.27
James admits that he has done no more than to show that pluralism is “a
fully coordinate hypothesis with monism.” He has returned where he began
in “The Sentiment of Rationality” and in “The Will to Believe.” He is faced
with two live hypotheses; he must choose between them, and his choice will
be determined by which hypothesis will feel more rational and allow for
more intimacy.
James assumes that we too are confronted by the same momentous alter-
native. But are we? For some of us a theism is surely a live hypothesis and for
others the alternative is what he calls “dualistic theism.” In acknowledging
that both monistic and pluralistic pantheism are only hypotheses, he leaves
room for atheism and dualistic theism as rival hypotheses.
27. Ibid, 143–144.

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17
The Real William James

Response to Robert Meyers
JAMES’S WRITINGS are so rich in content that one is not surprised when dif-
ferent readers find different points in one and the same essay by James or even
offer divergent interpretations. Indeed, it is one of the aims of the collection
one of us (RAP) edited, The Cambridge Companion to William James, to intro-
duce readers to more than one perspective on this philosopher’s thought.1 But
pluralism, as James well knew, does not mean that anything goes. In what
follows we will take issue with certain of Robert Meyers’s readings of James as
well as note, with distress, where he has misrepresented our own view.2
James’s Moral Impulse
Let us begin with our claim that what stands behind James’s philosophizing
is a moral impulse. That is not to say that James was primarily a moral phi-
1. Ruth Anna Putnam, ed., The Cambridge Companion to William James (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
2. Robert Meyers, “Putnam and the Permanence of Pragmatism,” Transactions of
the Charles S. Peirce Society 34, no. 2 (1998): 346–364.

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losopher. In fact, his only systematic work in moral philosophy, “The Moral
Philosopher and the Moral Life,” questions the very possibility of moral
philosophy. Its very first sentence asserts, “The main purpose of this paper is
to show that there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy made
up dogmatically in advance . . . [and that] there can be no final truth in
ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience
and said his say.”3 Still, there seems to be an intermediate task for the moral
philosopher—namely, “to find an account of the moral relations that ob-
tain among things, which will weave them into the unity of a stable system,
and make of the world what one may call a genuine universe from the
ethical point of view.”4 But this task proves to be impossible. The ethical
philosopher is not permitted to bring to this task any ideal of her own other
than this idea of coherence, yet what she finds in the world are ideals that
are not all co-realizable; she must choose among them a coherent set, yet
she is not allowed to choose. Nor does James believe in the existence of “a
self-proclaiming set of laws, or an abstract ‘moral reason.”’5
There seems to be, however, an alternative for the moral philosopher.
“Since everything which is demanded is by that fact good, must not the
guiding principle for ethical philosophy (since all demands conjointly can-
not be satisfied in this poor world) be simply to satisfy at all times as many
demands as we can?”6 Our demands, however, cannot be rank-ordered by
some algorithm, James tells us; rather, what we must do is try to realize “ide-
als by whose realization the least possible number of other ideals are de-
stroyed.”7 This principle does not produce “an ethical philosophy made up
dogmatically in advance,” for the result of applying this principle (however
Works, 6:141–162, 141. Oddly, Meyers interprets this remark to mean that James
thought there were no moral truths on a par with physical ones; it seems to us that
James has just asserted that both kinds of truths await the judgment of further experi-
ence.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 151.
6. Ibid., 155. Also see Chapter 23 (“The Moral Life of a Pragmatist”) of this vol-
ume.
7. James, “The Moral Philosopher,” in Works, 6:155. Consider also this remark: “No
single abstract principle can be so used as to yield to the philosopher anything like a
scientifically accurate and genuinely useful casuistic scale” (153).

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THE REAL WILLIAM JAMES 263
we make sense of it in a concrete case) is always subject to correction in the

light of subsequent experience. Whatever choices we make, however sincere
we are in our efforts, we must always listen for the “cries of the wounded”
that will inform us if we have made a serious mistake. The result of James’s
meta-ethical reflections is not a normative theory, but neither is it a moral
skepticism. As James asserts in “The Dilemma of Determinism,” he “cannot
understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief
that acts are really good or bad”!8
Granting, then, that what James produced was not primarily moral philos-
ophy or ethical theory, we nevertheless maintain that what motivated James to
adopt certain philosophical positions and to reject certain other positions were
what he perceived to be the moral consequences of adopting these positions.
Here we may note in passing that, contrary to Meyers, James did not attack
moral holidays; on the contrary he understood it to be a significant benefit of
a belief in the Absolute that it permits moral holidays.9 However, James found
other consequences of absolute idealism incompatible with “other truths of
mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account” and concludes, “I just
take my moral holidays; or else as a professional philosopher, I try to justify
them by some other principle.”10 James believed that taking, once in a while, a
moral holiday was necessary for one’s mental health.
What then do we mean by saying that James’s philosophizing is prompted
by a moral impulse? We mean two, not entirely unconnected, things. First, he
sought a world view (i.e., a metaphysical and an epistemological position)
that left room for and made sense of our moral lives. For James this meant
that our choices and our actions would make a real difference. Thus the quote
above, “I cannot understand the willingness to act . . . without the belief that
acts are really good or bad,” continues, “I cannot understand the belief that an
act is bad, without regret at its happening. I cannot understand regret without
the admission of real, genuine possibilities in the world.”11
Of course, James did NOT say that “we live in a pluralistic universe because
otherwise our moral lives would have no sense.” That is not how one argues for

9. By this term James understands time out from the strenuous efforts to make a
better world that he characteristically asks of us.

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a philosophical position. James did think that one should be able to take one’s
philosophy out of the study and into one’s everyday life. A philosophy that did
not jibe with the vital benefits one derives from one’s ordinary beliefs is to be
rejected. Clearly that does NOT mean, as Meyers claims, that “we can believe
as we wish even if we do not have probable evidence.”12 Neither did James hold
that “we are entitled to believe beyond the evidence, that is, to have ‘over-be-
liefs,’ as he called them, so long as we are tolerant of those who disagree 13 The
first of these misunderstandings flows from a too careless reading of the essay
“The Will to Believe.”14 James does not there argue that we are entitled to be-
lieve as we wish. As he points out, to say that would be either silly or vile, de-
pending on how it is understood. He states his thesis thus: “Our passional
nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between proposi-
tions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot be decided on intellectual
grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, ‘Do not decide, but leave the
question open,’ is itself a passional decision—just like deciding yes or no—and
is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.”15 Now it would be a serious
mistake to think that the sort of choice James has in mind concerns only deep
metaphysical issues. When a scientist decides to investigate a hypothesis, stak-
ing his reputation on its being fruitful to do so, or when one decides to invest
time and emotions in building a friendship, indeed whenever one takes a seri-
ous risk, one lets one’s “passional nature” decide.
Religious beliefs are one class of beliefs that one embraces on passional
grounds, or not at all. They are indeed “over-beliefs,” beliefs that go beyond
anything a science of religion, or a psychology of religious experience, can
warrant. We are entitled to these over-beliefs NOT “as long as we are toler-
ant” but because they are the sorts of beliefs that can be decided only by our
passional nature. To be sure, we are to be tolerant of the over-beliefs of oth-
ers. We are to be tolerant because “the truth is too great for any one actual
mind, even though that mind is dubbed ‘the Absolute,’ to know the whole
of it. The facts and worths of life need many cognizers to take them in. There
is no point of view absolutely public and universal.”16 The practical conse-
12. Meyers, “Putnam,” 352.

13. Ibid.
14. James, “The Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe, in Works, vol. 6.
15. Ibid., 20.

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quence of such a pluralistic philosophy, James continues, “is at any rate, the
outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant.”17 Perhaps that is what
Meyers meant when he said that we are entitled to our over-beliefs as long as
we are tolerant of the over-beliefs of others: our over-beliefs must leave room
for tolerance.
The pluralistic universe leaves room for acts that are really good or bad, so
it leaves room for making sense of our moral lives. Acts are really good or
bad if they make a really good or bad difference to the lives of others. They
can do that only if we live in, and know that we live in, a common world.
This is the relevance to morality of James’s direct realism to which we shall
turn in a moment. Meanwhile there is a second sense in which James’s
philosophizing is prompted by a moral impulse. Many of James’s essays were
first given as lectures to students or to alumnae. These people often suffered
from a sense of ennui; they failed to see meaning in life, or more specifically
in their own lives. James addressed these concerns of his audiences. Thus he
addressed alumnae of women’s colleges in “The Social Value of the College
Bred,” assuring them that their education was not wasted,18 he addressed
directly the question “What Makes a Life Significant?” and so on.19 Even the
lectures on pragmatism were addressed not to professional philosophers but
to educated, middle-class ladies and gentlemen who tried to find a spiritu-
ally safe haven in a confusing world. Some of these matters are discussed in
greater detail in “Some of Life’s Ideals.”20
James on Truth
Robert Meyers feels that one of us (HP) has been much too charitable to
James on truth. It seems to us, however, that Meyers has not entirely cor-
rectly represented either James’s view of truth or HP’s interpretation of it. In
17. Ibid.
18. James, “The Social Value of the College Bred,” in Essays, Comments and Reviews,
in Works, 15:106–112.
19. James, “What Makes a Life Significant?” in Talks to Teachers on Psychology, in
Works, 10:150–167.
20. See Ruth Anna Putnam, “Some of Life’s Ideals,” in Cambridge Companion to
James, 282–299.

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part this is due to the unfortunate circumstance that HP’s most extensive
interpretation of James (“James’s Theory of Truth”) was published after
Meyers’s paper was written.21
Although Meyers is correct to say that in Pragmatism HP defends James’s
theory of truth from two common criticisms, he fails to mention that HP
himself rejects James’s, Dewey’s, and Peirce’s theories of truth on the ground
that all three thinkers believe that a proposition cannot be true unless it is
“fated” to be verified in the long run.22 Thus it was not HP’s purpose merely
to defend James from criticism but to show what the right criticism of James’s
theory of truth really should be. In this section, we shall briefly describe our
interpretation of James’s theory of truth, and then examine Meyers’s criti-
cisms of what he understands to be James’ theory.
“James’s Theory of Truth” cites evidence to show that in papers and books
written at all stages of his philosophical career James repeatedly insisted that
a true belief must be such that we are “fated” to converge to it, such that it
becomes “the whole drift of thought,” such that it becomes “the ultimate
consensus.” This “Peircean strain,” as we call it, is unaccountably neglected
by James’s friends and foes, but it is everywhere present in James’s writing. At
the same time, James insists that truth does involve correspondence to reali-
ties (note the plural!). Thus (again contrary to many interpretations of James)
James does have a “correspondence theory of truth.” However, James is em-
phatic in insisting that merely speaking of “agreement” between beliefs and
realities is empty: We have to say what ‘agreement’ consists in in concrete
terms, terms a pragmatist can understand, if we are to have a theory of truth
at all.23
21. In addition, the following papers by us on pragmatism are not taken account of
by Meyers: “Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity” (HP), “Pragmatism and Relativism”
(HP), and “Education for Democracy” (HP), in Words and Life, ed. James Conant
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); “Why We Need William James,”
The Times Literary Supplement, no. 4864 (21 June 1996): 14–15; “Pragmatism” (HP),
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95 no. 3 (1995): 291–306 [Chapter 2, this vol-
ume]; and “Pragmatism and Realism” (HP), Cardozo Law Review 18, no. 153 (1996):
153–170 [Chapter 9, this volume]; as well as the papers by RAP cited in notes 6 and
20.
22. Of course, pragmatist notions of verification are very different from positivist
ones, something discussed in HP’s article “Pragmatism.”
23. See James, Pragmatism, in Works, 1:96.

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James attempts to satisfy this desideratum in the following way: he con-

ceives of beliefs as “so much flat psychological surface,” if they are not con-
nected to realities by external relations.24 The external relations that James
proposes are the very same relations that are involved in the process of veri-
fication. Sometimes, but only sometimes, verification is, for James, a simple
matter of seeing whether an idea “copies” its reality. Generally, verification is
an indirect (and nonterminating) process. Thus when James writes (in
Pragmatism) that true beliefs are made true, he understands this literally. The
belief that the earth is round, for example, is constantly being made true by
all of the many experiences which directly and indirectly verify it. Be this
right or wrong, this is not a theory that confuses truth and verification; it is
rather an ambitious and novel attempt to define truth in terms of verifica-
tion.
For the sake of completeness, we add here because of what has come to be
called the ‘underdetermination’ of belief by evidence, James is able to hold
that in some (not all!) cases there is an element of choice in what we will
count as a verification, and thus values are able to come into play. We shall
elaborate on this point below. Meanwhile it suffices to say that according to
James verification is possible even in the case of religious and ethical beliefs,
not, indeed, in the lifetime of any one individual, but in the whole experi-
ence of the human race.25
Turning now to Meyers’s essay, we note that Meyers grants that “Putnam is
right” in holding that James did not confuse the two notions of truth and
confirmation but “argues for their connection.” Meyers continues, “This argu-
ment assumes a nominalist conception of abstract terms,” but this is mislead-
ing. Of course, James is responsible for the widespread tendency to classify
him as a nominalist, for in the third Pragmatism lecture, “Some Metaphysical
Problems Pragmatically Considered,” he allies his own position with that of
“nominalists.”26 Nevertheless, James is not a nominalist as that term is now
24. Hilary Putnam criticizes this view of James in Chapter 11 (James’s Theory of
Truth”) of this volume.
25. James writes, “In a question of this scope [Is this a moral world?], the experi-
ence of the entire human race must make the verification, and all the evidence will not
be ‘in’ till the final integration of things, when the last man has had his say and con-
tributed his share to the still unfinished x.” The Will to Believe, in Works, 6:87.

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used in analytic philosophy. For James emphatically insists that relations are
just as real as particulars, and in present-day usage that would make James a
realist about abstract entities. What Meyers means, however, by calling James
a “nominalist” is that according to James there is no one property which is
necessary and sufficient for calling a belief true, one and the same property in
the case of each and every belief, and that is quite right. (We would express
this by saying that James rejects essentialism, not “realism.”) When Meyers
argues, however, that “the state of affairs depicted by p exists” is precisely such
a property (the “essential” property of every p such that p is true), we reply on
James’s behalf (and not only on James’s behalf ) that (1) Meyers has only exhib-
ited a connection between one semantical term (“true”) and another semanti-
cal term (“depicts”). We have been given no reason to believe that “depicting”
is one and the same relation in each and every case; indeed James provides
counterexamples to this claim.27 (2) Moreover (as many philosophers have
pointed out) you can be as “realist” as you like about truth without having to
hypostatize “states of affairs” as Meyers does here.28 We do not need to hypos-
tatize an entity called “the state of affairs that the sun is ninety-three million
miles from the earth” to explain why “The sun is ninety-three million miles
from the earth” is true, nor does hypostatizing such an entity do anything but
generate pseudo-clarifications.29
We want to emphasize that we are not saying that James was right in
holding that the “correspondence” between a true statement and the realities
it depicts can be explained in terms of the notions of verification, conver-
gence, etc., that he employs.30 But to say, as Meyers does, that to hold a theory
27. Referring to a clock on the wall, James points out that an idea of ours may
“copy” its dial but, unless we are clock-makers, not its works, and that it is “hard to see
exactly” what our ideas would copy when we think of its spring’s elasticity. Nevertheless,
we take the object to be a clock, we use it as a clock, and as long as that does not lead
to frustration, we verify thus it’s being a clock. Pragmatism, in Works, 1:96, 99.
28. Davidson recently, but before him Frege and Collingwood, for example.
29. Saying that the statement that the sun is ninety-three million miles from the
earth is true because the state of affairs that the sun is ninety-three million miles from
the earth “exists” is precisely such a pseudo-clarification, as we are sure every pragma-
tist would say.
30. HP’s most recent view is set out in “Sense, Nonsense and the Senses” (Dewey
Lectures, 1994), The Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 9 (September 1994): 445–517. See,
especially, Lecture III, “The Face of Cognition.”

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according to which confirmation is involved (in a highly complex way) in “cor-

respondence” is ipso facto to confuse “the nature of truth, i.e., correspon-
dence, with the procedures we use to discover what is true, and this revives
the charge that James confused confirmation and truth” is like saying that
because Tarski employed the notion of a set in defining truth that “Tarski
confuses the nature of truth, i.e., correspondence, with the procedures we
use to define truth, and this revives the charge that Tarski confused sets and
truth.”31 Using a notion in a definition of truth is not the same thing as con-
fusing truth with that notion.
Meyers begins his discussion of Russell’s charge that James thinks that a
true belief is the same as a belief that makes people happy in the long run by
saying, “First, although James did claim that a belief’s capacity to make one
happy does not make it true he still held that emotional consequences are
relevant to truth,” but concludes that “it is not clear that Putnam is right to
claim that James avoids Russell’s criticism.”32 This is exactly analogous to
Meyers’s previous criticism, that because James holds that confirmation is rel-
evant to truth, he does not avoid the criticism of conflating confirmation and
truth. The criticism is as invalid in the present case as it was in the earlier one.
To say that in those cases where theory is underdetermined by evidence, other
considerations, including the emotional consequences of holding a particular
belief, are relevant to its truth, is not to conflate truth and happiness (or any
other kind of emotional consequence). In any case, both criticisms cannot be
true, for surely Meyers does not wish to claim that James defined truth as
confirmation and defined it as a tendency to lead to happiness!
Let us spell this out in more detail. We do not think that James should
have accepted Lovejoy’s criticism, for that criticism assumes that there is in
any situation only one true theory. In contrast, it is James’s view that in some
cases (NOT in all!) the realities the belief is about do not, by themselves,
determine whether the belief is true or false. For example, the world, as such,
does not determine that one and only one system of set theory is correct:
there are, at least as it seems to us at present, genuine “equally good” alterna-
tives.33 The rules of classical semantics (what Meyers calls “rules relating [the

32. Ibid., 356.
33. This is, to be sure, a contemporary example; James gives examples from the
science of his own time.

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parts of a sentence] to objects and their properties”) do, indeed, generate

tautologous biconditionals such as “‘there are measurable cardinals’ is true if
and only if there are measurable cardinals,” but, pace Meyers, this does not
mean that one must endorse a metaphysical realist understanding of truth
and refer to every other understanding as “confusion.” It seems to us that if
we eventually decide that one system of set theory (e.g., Zermelo-Fraenkel
set theory) is “superior” and it becomes “the” set theory that mathematics
employs, what will have made that set theory the “true” one or the “right”
one is, in part, the aesthetic satisfaction it affords us. In such cases, “satisfac-
tion” (of many kinds) is an element in determining “truth.”
Instead of speaking of aesthetic satisfaction we might have used the word
“temperament,” a term used by James both in the early essay “The Sentiment
of Rationality” and in the quite late lectures in Pragmatism. In both places,
James points out that one’s philosophy is in part a function of one’s temper-
ament. That is, of course, simply another way of saying, as he did in “The
Will to Believe” that, confronted with “a genuine option that cannot be
decided on intellectual grounds,” our “passional nature” must decide. Now
metaphysical questions are questions that cannot be decided on intellectual
grounds, and yet James believed that we (and surely this is true of anyone
who reads James) cannot evade these questions. But temperament is not
simply “taste”; philosophical disputes are not idle chatter. As we pointed out
in “William James’s Ideas,” philosophical disputes are in part about “deter-
mining what sort of temperament is best suited to the universe we live in.”34
But, of course, our conception of the universe is in part a function of our
temperament. To this one must add, as we did in “William James’s Ideas”
that for James the universe is open; what it will be depends on us, on what
ideals we attempt to realize and on how much effort we put into that at-
tempt, and that too is a matter of temperament. This intimate relationship
between temperament, conception of the universe (philosophy), and what
the universe actually will be makes it possible to subject temperament to
criticism.
It is clear that this is an antifoundationalist point of view. But antifoun-
dationalism is not skepticism. We believe that Robert Meyers’s insistence
34. “William James’s Ideas,” in Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1990), 217–231, 228.

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that James is a modern skeptic is due to his (Meyers’s) own metaphysical

realism. The ubiquity of temperament does not mean that we do not live “by
reason and intellect” but it does mean that the pragmatists’ conception of
“reason and intellect” is wider, more generous than that of metaphysical re-
alists. When James accused Leibniz of having only a feeble grasp of reality he
meant specifically that Leibniz failed to imagine adequately the extent of
human suffering. Can one really say, as Meyers does, that Leibniz has “just a
different predisposition from the pragmatic”?35 James tried hard in the first
Pragmatism lecture to remind his audience of the existence of real suffer-
ing—he read to them accounts of the horrors of abject poverty—and thus to
“predispose” them to find the facile optimism of a Leibnizean philosophy
inadequate. Because temperament is not all there is—there is also experi-
ence—one’s temperament can be modified. We find Meyers’s concluding
remarks on this subject rather puzzling. Temperament can be criticized, he
says, in so far as we accept the same assumptions. But earlier he said that “all
discussion rests on assumptions accepted on the basis of temperament.”36
How then can common assumptions lead to criticism of the common tem-
perament on the basis of which these assumptions were accepted? Of course,
we agree that all discussion rests on some common assumptions, just as all
discussion is provoked by some disagreements. But neither assumptions nor
disagreements rest wholly on temperament. Our passional nature, even
when it is decisive, works on material that is not itself passional. James was
a strong proponent of tolerance, of “living with our differences,” and op-
posed to attempts “to silence our opponents.” We do not claim, nor did
James, “There is reconciliation independent of temperament”; we cannot
imagine what that is supposed to mean.
James’s “Direct Realism”
In the section of his paper that deals with this topic, Robert Meyers raises a
host of complex issues. We shall take up each of his major points very briefly,
knowing that a full treatment would require an essay devoted to each one,

36. Ibid., 353.

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and we shall take them up in an order which is the reverse of the order in
which they occur in Meyers’s essay.
1. The “time-lag” objection. Meyers writes: “How can I be directly aware
of the sun if my view of it is always eight minutes old?” This is an old objec-
tion to direct realism, but we have never been able to see why it is supposed
to be telling. Direct realists, starting with Aristotle, have always been aware
that we do not see until light reaches the eye, hear until the sound reaches
the ear, etc. There are physical processes, terminating in modifications of the
sense organ, which have to take place before what is perceived is perceived.
But that does not show that what we are aware of is modifications of the
sense organ, or events in our own brains, or events in an immaterial “inner
theater,” and not external things, events, and properties. Opponents of di-
rect realism never ask, “How can one be directly aware of the sun if it is
ninety-three million miles away?” for they see that to assume that one can
only be directly aware of what is zero distance away would be to beg the
question against direct realism. And to assume that we can only be directly
aware of events that are zero temporal distance away is equally to beg the
question. For if we can perceive what is spatially distant (and in some cases,
e.g., hearing, and even in some visual cases, without perceiving how distant)
why should we not be able to perceive what is temporally (better, spatiotem-
porally) distant (without perceiving how distant)?
Direct perception is supervenient on physical transactions which take
time; in some cases (e.g., seeing a star which is many light years away) a lot
of time. From what premises is it supposed to follow that when I see a star
what I “directly” perceive is not really the star (which is distant in space-
time) but only a “representation” of the star? We suspect that the premises,
were they made explicit, would be just the tired old premises of the sense-da-
tum theory.
2. “Direct realism tells us nothing about the nature or the validity of the
inference from a pure experience to the judgment that the object is real.”37
It seems to us that Meyers must be reasoning as follows: perception is not
infallible; therefore, before one can be justified in trusting any perception
one has, one must make an “inference” to the conclusion that the percep-
tion is veridical, and direct realism does not tell us how to make this “in-
37. Ibid., 361.

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ference.” The supposed difficulty is this: what her senses tell the subject is
“I have a perception whose content is that there is a chair in front of me,”
so how can she possibly ‘infer’ that there is a chair in front of her? But few
epistemologists would now claim that her knowledge of the “content” of
her perception (of what she “seems” to see, or hear, etc.) is infallible. So
perhaps the real premise is “I think I have a perception whose content is
that there is a chair in front of me.” But that premise is not infallible ei-
ther!
It is true that direct realism, as such, does not offer an answer to this sup-
posed difficulty, but pragmatism does. The view common to all the classical
pragmatists is that doubt requires justification. If one perceives a chair in front
of one, and there is no reason not to trust one’s perception, then one simply
accepts the perception (or putative perception). One accepts “I see a chair,”
not “I seem to see a chair.” One does not make an “inference” to “I see a
chair.”38 And if the perception one trusted is not veridical, then, in general,
future experience will show that. And among the factors that will show that
a perception was not veridical are such factors as its failure to cohere with
other perceptions and beliefs, the failure of predictions based on it, the ex-
tent to which retaining it disturbs funded beliefs—all of which are men-
tioned by James (as well as by the other pragmatists).
Perhaps Meyers’s worry is that James does not offer a justification of our
trust that future experience will, in the long run, add up to some coherent
“ultimate consensus?” But isn’t that just to complain that he hasn’t justified
induction?
3. James is supposedly committed to holding that “the public space contains a
contradictory object.” 39 The example is of a case in which a leaf looks like a frog
from a certain vantage point. Since the leaf looks like a leaf and not a frog
from other vantage points, and both pure experiences occupy the same public
space, the objects in that space must be a “contradictory object,” or so Meyers
argues. This case subdivides into several possible subcases.
(i) Subcase A. To a quick look the leaf looked like a frog, but the subject
could have noticed that it was not a frog if she had looked more carefully. In
38. As Wittgenstein put it, “The chain of reasons has an end.” Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1958), §326.

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this case “the froggy look” is only a part of the total look. (Note that for
James, what we perceive is not always a particular: particulars, qualities, and
even relations can all be “bits of pure experience.” A froggy look can be a bit
of pure experience.) However, Meyers asks, is not talk of looks already im-
plicitly talk of appearance to observers? (“If they [looks] have the form ‘X
appears F to S’ where S is an observer, minds would be primary substances.”)
Although we agree with Meyers that James’s suggestion that there is
something wrong with classical logic is hardly the way to deal with this ob-
jection, a better way was suggested by Russell, who adopted James’s direct
realism (with full acknowledgment) in The Analysis of Mind.40 If the “looks”
we are talking about are objective in the sense that the leaf would resemble a
frog (to the extent that it does) when viewed from that particular point un-
der those particular conditions no matter which normal observer looked—
or if a photograph from that point under those conditions would show a
(partly) “froggy” appearance—then the appropriate relativization is not to a
mind but simply to the place from which one is supposed to look and the
conditions of lighting, etc., at the time. “Looks,” in this sense, are objective
phenomena.41
(ii) Subcase B. The same as subcase A except that the leaf looks exactly like
a frog from the point of view in question (a photo taken from that place
would be indistinguishable from a photo of a frog). This case can be handled
exactly like subcase A.
(iii) Subcase C. The look is “in the subject’s mind,” in the sense that a
normal observer looking from that same place under the same conditions
would not experience any such look. In this case the “bit of pure experience”
would be classed as an “unreal object” by James, and there is no problem
because unreal objects can occupy the same public space as real ones.
In HP’s two essays on James’s theory of perception (the one cited by
Meyers, and “Pragmatism and Realism,” which appeared after Meyers wrote
his essay), he makes it clear that we do not accept James’s way of dealing with
nonveridical perceptions. The way we prefer is due to Austin, and it treats
nonveridical experiences as cases in which a subject seems to herself to per-
40. Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921).
41. This is remarked by John L. Austin, in Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1962), and also by Hilary Putnam in “Sense, Nonsense and the
Senses.”

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ceive something (but not as cases in which an “unreal object” is perceived).

Meyers is right that such an account does not account for minds in the way
James’s metaphysics does (by identifying them with bundles of pure experi-
ences). But unlike James, we are not attracted to a metaphysics of pure expe-
rience. What we do find important is that James showed that the facts of
perception do not force one to postulate intermediaries between the per-
ceiver and the perceived in the fashion that has been so coercive in the
post-Cartesian history of philosophy.42
42. This historical significance of James’s theory of perception is described in some

detail in Chapter 9 (“Pragmatism and Realism”) of this volume.

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18
Dewey’s Central Insight
Hilary Putnam
DEWEY ’S GIFFORD LECTURES , published as The Quest for Certainty, are a

wonderful presentation of his philosophy, including his ethical philosophy.
One of the finest things about them, in my opinion, is the analogies that
Dewey sees between the blinkers that traditional philosophers wear when
they discuss epistemology and the blinkers they wear when they discuss eth-
ics. It is, of course, in the case of empiricism that these analogies are surpris-
ing. We are not surprised to be told that rationalism (in the extended sense
of the belief that important truths about the cosmos and about how we are
supposed to live in it can be known a priori) receives the same criticism from
pragmatism whether the subject be the nature of the world, or how human
beings should act, or what kind of knowledge is worthy of the name.1
Dewey’s concern, however, is not just to attack rationalism but to distin-
guish his thought carefully from traditional empiricism. And here Dewey
has some unexpected things to say.
One of these things is that the defects of empiricism are not altogether
different from the defects of rationalism. (To be sure, Hegel had already said
something of the kind, and it is important that Dewey began his philosoph-
1. Note that in Dewey’s extended sense, rationalism is not a movement that began
with Descartes and ended with Leibnitz: Plato was a rationalist, and Kant is still a ra-
tionalist in Dewey’s sense.

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DEWEY ’S CENTRAL INSIGHT 277
ical career as an idealist.)2 As Dewey puts it, “Just as sensationalism ignores

the functional role and hypothetical status of sensible qualities in an inquiry,
so rationalism makes a fixed and independent matter out of the utility of
conceptions in directing inquiry to solve particular problems.”3 Let us see
what Dewey means by this claim.
Rationalism, famously, thinks the general form of scientific explanations
can be known a priori: we know a priori the laws of geometry and even the
fundamental principles of mechanics, according to Descartes (and Kant
even attempted a “transcendental deduction” of Newton’s theory of gravi-
ty).4 But empiricism equally thinks that the general form of scientific data,
indeed of all empirical data, can be known a priori (even if it does not say so
in so many words). From Locke, Berkeley, and Hume down to Ernst Mach,
empiricists held that all empirical data consist of “sensations,” conceived as
an unconceptualized given against which putative knowledge claims can be
checked. Against this, William James had already insisted that while all per-
ceptual experience has both conceptual and nonconceptual aspects, the at-
tempt to divide any experience that is a recognition of something into parts
is futile. “Sensations and apperceptive ideas fuse here so intimately [in a
‘presented and recognized material object’] that you can no more tell where
one begins and the other ends, than you can tell, in those cunning circular
panoramas that have lately been exhibited, where the real foreground and
the painted canvas join together.”5 Dewey, continuing the line of thought
that James had begun, insists that by creating new observation concepts we
“institute” new data. Modern physics (and of course not only physics) has
richly borne him out. A scientist may speak of observing a proton colliding
with a nucleus, or of observing a virus with the aid of an electron micro-
scope, or of observing genes or black holes, and so on. Neither the form of
possible explanations nor the form of possible data can be fixed in advance, once
and for all.
2. See Hegel’s early “The Relation of Skepticism to Philosophy,” in Jenaer Schriften

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), in which he says that empiricism has a “dogmatic” view of
experience, i.e., that it forces a particular ontology on experience (a priori, as it were).
3. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, in Later Works, 4:144.
4. See Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992), chap. 4.

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Of course, neither James nor Dewey denies the existence of a preconcep-

tual substratum of sensation. But for Dewey—and we will shortly see how
he extends this idea to the field of ethics—sensation, which is unconceptu-
alized or inadequately conceptualized, is problematic; rather than constitut-
ing data, evidence, it poses a problem to be solved. So, for example, in
Chapter 5 of The Quest for Certainty (“Ideas at Work”), Dewey writes,
Now so deeply engrained are the conclusions of the old tradition of rational-
ism versus (sensationalistic) empiricism, that the question will still be raised:
What other certification could be given or can now be given for the properties
of scientific physical objects save by inferential extension of the universally
found properties of all objects of sense perception? Is there any alternative
unless we are prepared to fall back upon a priori rational conceptions sup-
posed to bring their own sufficient authority with them?
It is at this point that the recent recognition that the conceptions by which
we think scientific objects are derived neither from sense nor from a priori
conceptions has its logical and philosophical force. Sense qualities . . . are
something to be known, they are challenges to knowing, setting problems for
investigation. . . . For experimental inquiry or thinking signifies directed activ-
ity, doing something which varies the conditions under which objects are
observed and directly had and by instituting new arrangements among them.6
And Dewey goes on to explain that the formation of these “conceptions by

which we think scientific objects” is inseparable from the discovery of opera-
tions to be performed on those objects and of relations between them. “These
operations have been continuously refined and elaborated during the history
of man on earth,” he writes, “although it is only during the last few centuries
that the whole affair of controlled thinking and of its issue in genuine knowl-
edge, has been seen to be bound up with their selection until determination.”7
Turning to the topic he will take up in Chapter 7 (“The Seat of Intellectual
Authority”), Dewey writes,
The history of the theory of knowledge of epistemology would have been very
different if instead of the word ‘data’ of ‘givens’, it had happened to start with
calling the qualities in question ‘takens’. Not that the data are not existential
6. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, in Later Works, 4:98–99.

7. Ibid., 99.

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and qualities of the ultimately ‘given’—that is, the total subject-matter which
is had in non-cognitive experiences. But as data they are selected from this
total original subject-matter which gives the impetus to knowing; they are
discriminated for a purpose:—that, namely, of affording signs or evidence to
define and locate a problem, and thus give a clew to its resolution.”8
A corollary of this criticism is that both rationalism and empiricism fail to

see the extent to which scientific discoveries can be radically novel—and the
novelty can concern alike the form of what we take to be framework princi-
ples (geometry, deterministic causality, contact action), the range of what we
make to be observable qualities of things, and the very notions of what con-
stitutes a scientific object. Against both perspectives, Dewey calls upon an
object of scientific study to admit “the hypothetical status of all data and
premises.”9
The Analogous Situation in Ethics
The penultimate chapter of The Quest for Certainty (“The Construction of

God”) describes the situation with philosophies of ethics, and, as I began by
saying, Dewey finds that situation surprisingly analogous. That there is apri-
orism in ethics as well as in philosophical cosmology is evident. But what is
the problem with empiricism? What is the mistake that Dewey will find
analogous to the empiricist confusion of unconceptualized possible qualities
with data?
As far back as the 1908 edition of the Ethics he coauthored with Tufts,
Dewey used Bentham’s version of utilitarianism as his chief example of the
failure of classical empiricism to have an adequate conception of what it
should mean to be Dewey’s kind of empiricist, an experimental empiricist,
in ethics.10 In The Quest for Certainty, Dewey does not mention Bentham by
name, but the defects he enumerates in empiricist ethics are clearly the de-
fects he found in utilitarianism in particular. And chief among those defects
was the following.
8. Ibid., 142–143.
9. Ibid., 147.
10. Dewey, Ethics (rev. ed.), in Later Works, vol. 7.

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Just as (classical) empiricism mistakenly takes unconceptualized sensa-

tions to be data, whereas the fact is that the less we are able to conceptualize
a sensation the more it represents a mere problem—an impetus to investiga-
tion at best, rather than a piece of evidence—so utilitarianism mistakenly
takes mere enjoyments to be values, things which ought to be sought,
whereas, according to Dewey, the fact is that the less we understand an en-
joyment, the less we know about what brought it into existence and about
its possible future effects (and its relations to other actual and possible enjoy-
ments and discomforts and their causes and effects), the more it represents a
mere problem, an impetus to operational thinking that needs to be applied
to judgments of values just as it has now finally been applied in conceptions
of physical objects.
And similarly:
The analogy between the status of the theory of values and the theory of ideas
about natural objects before the rise of experimental inquiry may be carried
further. The sensationalistic theory of the origin and the test of thought
evoked, by way of reaction, the transcendental theory of a priori ideas. For it
failed utterly to account for objective connection, order and regularity in ob-
jects observed. Similarly, any doctrine that identifies the mere fact of being
liked with the value of the object liked so fails to give direction to conduct
when direction is needed that it automatically calls forth the assertion that
there are values eternally in Being that are the standards of all judgments and
the obligatory ends of all action. Without the introduction of operational
thinking, we oscillate between a theory that, in order to save the objectivity of
judgments of values, isolates them from experience and nature, and a theory
that, in order to save their concrete and human significance, reduces them to
mere statements about our own feelings.11
Dewey’s own way of making this more precise involves successfully carry-
ing out the task that, in his view, utilitarianism had not been able to carry
out (although Mill made a famous attempt): distinguishing between the
desired and the desirable, or, as Dewey often preferred to say, between the
valued and the valuable. We have already indicated how Dewey drew this
distinction: the fundamental idea was to distinguish between what is valued

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in the sense of evoking a mere feeling of liking or enjoyment, and that which
has been critically evaluated and studied. Only when we have acquired
knowledge of the relevant causes and effects and relations does what is val-
ued become valuable or what is satisfying become satisfactory. Or, as Dewey
himself puts it,
To say that something satisfies is to report something as an isolated finality. To

assert that it is satisfactory is to define it in its connections and interactions.
The fact that it pleases or is immediately congenial poses a problem to judg-
ment. How shall the satisfaction be rated? Is it a value or is it not? Is it some-
thing to be prized and cherished, to be enjoyed? Not stern moralists alone but
everyday experience informs us that finding satisfaction in a thing may be a
warning, a summons to be on the lookout for consequences. To declare some-
thing satisfactory is to assert that it meets specifiable conditions. It is, in effect,
a judgment that the thing “will do.” It involves a prediction; it contemplates
a future in which the thing will continue to serve; it will do. It asserts a conse-
quence the thing will actively institute; it will do. That it is satisfying is the
content of a proposition of fact; that it is satisfactory is a judgment, an esti-
mate, an appraisal. It denotes an attitude to be taken, that of striving to per-
petuate and make secure.12
What to Make of All This
The idea of drawing an analogy between the overly simple way in which
utilitarianism conceives of value and the overly simple way in which classical
sensationalistic empiricism conceives of experience is one I find very attrac-
tive. But the way in which Dewey draws the distinction between the valued
and the valuable (and there are many similar passages in his writing, both in
The Quest for Certainty and elsewhere) raises many problems, including
problems of interpretation.
What makes Dewey’s interpretation difficult in general is that in any one
work Dewey tends to stress one or another criticism of traditional views,
leaving other criticisms (and the aspects of his own positive views that he
brings out when he makes those other criticisms of the traditional views) to
12. Ibid., 208.

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other works. The result is that it is hard to get a satisfactory idea of Dewey’s
entire ethical thinking from any one work, unless it be the Ethics—and even
the second (1932) edition of the Ethics fails to fully reflect Dewey’s mature
conception of inquiry, in part just because it is largely a revision of a much
earlier work. Robert Westbrook has remarked that, in an earlier paper set-
ting forth an argument defending democracy that I find in Dewey (I called
it an “epistemological argument for democracy”), I put together pieces that
are genuinely in Dewey in a way Dewey would have agreed with, but that
the argument was never explicitly stated by Dewey himself in the way I gave
it.13 As he put it:
So when Putnam says ‘one can find’ an ‘epistemological argument for democ-
racy’ in Dewey’s work, what he must mean is that one can reconstruct or piece
together such an argument, an argument for which Dewey provided the ele-
ments but which he never put together himself. Putnam is thus not making
an argument like many of Rorty’s, which he knows Dewey would not have
made, but he is making an argument Dewey did not make. Yet Putnam is in
effect saying that Dewey could have made this argument, and I think he is
correct.14
The present essay is yet another part of this continuing effort on my part to
“reconstruct or piece together” Dewey’s arguments from his many different
writings, and I will be content if once again a reader as perceptive and as
versed in the whole of Dewey’s corpus as Westbrook is able to agree that
“Dewey could have made this argument.”
Here is a first effort—one that fits a good deal of “The Construction of
Good”—but one that, I will argue, cannot be adequate to Dewey’s view.
Suppose, to use a language not too far from Dewey’s own, we call an en-
joyment, or the satisfaction of an interest, evaluated if one has adequately
inquired into the ways it was brought about and into its consequences and
into the relation of all of these to the causes and consequences of the other
13. Hilary Putnam, “Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity,” in Words and Life, ed.
James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
14. Robert B. Westbrook, “Pragmatism and Democracy: Reconstructing the Logic
of John Dewey’s Faith,” in The Revival of Pragmatism, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

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enjoyments and woes that one knows of. One way of interpreting the criti-
cism of empiricist ethics (i.e., utilitarianism)—that “it takes values which are
casual [i.e., contingent] because unregulated by intelligent operations to be
values in and of themselves”—would be to suppose that Dewey is proposing
to replace the classical utilitarian maxim of seeking to produce “the greatest
happiness of the largest possible number” with a maxim directing one to
seek “the greatest amount of intelligently evaluated enjoyment on the part of
the largest possible number.”15 But this cannot be right.
If there is a central insight in Dewey’s ethics (and all of Dewey’s work is
in one way or another connected with “ethics”), it is that the application of
intelligence to moral problems is itself a moral obligation. Stated so baldly, the
insight may sound uncontroversial. “Who would deny that?” one thinks.
But, as we shall see, Dewey thinks that just about every moral philosophy
known to him in one way or another either denies or misconstrues precisely
this obligation. Think of those who today believe that abortion is always
wrong simply on the authority of the Catholic Church—I do not mean to
suggest that one could not think that abortion is wrong on other grounds,
nor that there are not Catholics who think that abortion is wrong on the
basis of reasoned arguments—but those for whom it is simply an article of
faith that the Church must be right on moral issues have, in the view of
Dewey (as well as all the other pragmatists), “blocked the path of inquiry.”
They have reverted to what Peirce called “The Method of Authority.”16
And such a reversion is a denial of the obligation to use intelligence, in
Dewey’s sense of active, fallibilistic, experimental inquiry in moral ques-
tions.
Obviously, utilitarians would agree with Dewey in rejecting appeals to
revelation and/or authority as the last court of appeal in ethical matters. And
Bentham certainly thought that he was preaching the use of intelligence in
dealing with ethical issues. Indeed, like Dewey, Bentham and those who
followed constantly advise us to use intelligence to figure out how to advance
the common good. Moreover, if Dewey’s proposal were merely to substitute
evaluated enjoyment for enjoyment in the utilitarian injunction to seek the
common good understood as a maximum of enjoyment, then Bentham could

16. See Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in Collected Papers, vol. 5.

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obviously accept it as a ‘friendly amendment’. But that is not Dewey’s pro-

posal at all.
As we shall see, it is not Dewey’s proposal because Dewey’s uses of enjoy
and its derivatives (as well as satisfy and its derivatives) have nothing to do
with Benthamite notions of enjoyment, satisfaction, and the like. And, in
Dewey’s view, what issues from the mistaken Benthamite conceptions of
enjoyment, satisfaction, and so on, is a fundamentally unsound conception
of both (a) the common good and (b) our motives for seeking it. Benthamite
utilitarianism cannot guide us in intelligently seeking what the common
good is because it cannot enable us to understand what the common good is
and because it makes unintelligible that one should be motivated to seek it
even when doing so interferes with one’s own pleasure. It is worth spelling
out these criticisms in more detail.
The Inadequacy of Benthamite “Pleasure”
Dewey is so little studied in Anglo-American philosophy departments today

that the first argument I am going to review, if mentioned in an ethics class
in one of the major PhD-granting institutions together with the question
“Which philosopher used this argument?” would probably evoke the answer
“Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State and Utopia.”17 But do not worry; the ar-
gument I have in mind is not a defense of Nozick’s radical libertarianism
(which he has subsequently given up); it is an argument to the effect that our
desire for happiness is not a desire for merely the subjective feeling that our
interests and goals have been satisfied but for their actual satisfaction in the
real world.
Here is Nozick’s statement of the argument:
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experi-
ence you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain
so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a
friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in
a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this ma-
17. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974),
42–45.

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chine for life, pre-programming your life’s experiences? If you are worried
about missing out on desirable experiences, we can suppose that business en-
terprises have researched thoroughly the lives of many others. You can pick
and choose from their large library or smorgasbord of such experiences, se-
lecting your life’s experiences for the next two years. After two years have
passed, you will have ten minutes out of the tank to select the experiences of
your next two years. Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re
there. You’ll think it’s actually happening. Others can also plug in to have the
experiences they want, so there’s no need to stay unplugged to serve them.
(Ignore problems such as who will service the machine if everyone plugs in.)
Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel
from the inside? 18
And Nozick answers his own question:
What does matter to us in addition to our experiences? First, we want to do

certain things and not just have the experience of doing them. In the case of
certain experiences, it is only because first we want to do the actions that we
want the experiences of doing them or thinking we’ve done them. . . . A sec-
ond reason for not plugging in is that we want to be a certain way, to be a
certain sort of person. Someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob.
There is no answer to the question what a person is like, who has been long in
the tank. Is he courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving? It’s not merely that
it’s difficult to tell; there’s no way he is. Plugging into the machine is a kind of
suicide. It will seem to some, trapped by a picture, that nothing about what
we are like can matter except as it gets reflected in our experiences. But should
it be surprising that what we are is important to us? Why should we be con-
cerned only with how our time is filled, but not with what we are?19
Perhaps a few exceptionally erudite graduate students may recall that in

another book that also has a reference to anarchism in its title, Robert Paul
Wolff raised a similar question and gave similar answers (without the lovely
device of the experience machine, however).20 But the point was anticipated,
and plays a crucial role, in Dewey’s portion of the 1908 Ethics.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchy (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).

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There he arrived at the following conclusions about happiness:
The net result of our discussion is, then, (1) that happiness consists in the
fulfillment in their appropriate objects (or the anticipation of such fulfill-
ment) of the powers of the self manifested in desires, purposes, efforts; (2)
true happiness consists in the satisfaction of those powers of the self which are
of higher quality; (3) that the man of good character, the one in whom these
high powers are already active, is the judge, in the concrete, of happiness and
misery.21
In contrast to this conception of happiness, Dewey describes essentially

the “picture” that Nozick says some of us are “trapped by,” according to
which “nothing about what we are like can matter except as it gets reflected
in our experiences.” In the view of happiness as “a sum or collection of sep-
arate states of sensation or feeling,”
it is pleasure alone, when dissociated, which is the real end of conduct, an

object being at best an external means of securing it. It is the pleasurable feel-
ing which happens to be associated with food, with music, with a landscape,
that makes it good; health, art, are not good in themselves. The other view
[Dewey’s] holds that pleasure has no such existence by itself; that it is only a
name for the pleasant object, that by pleasure is meant the agreement or con-
gruity which exists between some capacity of the agent and some objective
fact in which this capacity is realized.22
The work that this conception of happiness as satisfaction, actual or an-

ticipated, of a capacity of an agent by an “objective fact” (as opposed to a
21. Dewey, Middle Works, 5:256. Dewey arrives at this “net result” by a sympathetic
reading of Mill, whom he interprets as having broken with Bentham and as having
replaced the idea of “quantity of pleasure” by the idea of “quality of pleasure.” Of
course, points 1–3 can all be found in Aristotle! Dewey’s willingness to accept our ev-
eryday beliefs in the existence of such things as qualities of happiness, good character,
and so on—in the existence of what he calls “the goods that are diffused in human
experience” (Later Works, 1:305)—is defended by myself and Ruth Anna Putnam in
our “Dewey’s Logic: Epistemology as Hypothesis” and in my “Pragmatism and Moral
Objectivity,” both collected in Putnam, Words and Life.

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mere subjective feeling) does for Dewey’s critique of utilitarianism is enor-

mous. In the utilitarian conception, as Dewey writes, “When happiness is
conceived of as an aggregate of states of feeling, these are regarded as homog-
enous in quality, differing from one another only in intensity and duration.
Their qualitative differences are not intrinsic, but are due to the different
objects with which they are associated (as pleasures of hearing, or vision).
Hence they disappear when the pleasure is taken by itself as an end.” This
disappearance of the qualitative differences is (as far as importance to the
agent’s “happiness” is concerned), of course, just what makes it possible for
the utilitarian to speak of “summing” pleasures, “maximizing” them, and so
on. But if Dewey is right, and if “agreeableness is precisely the agreeableness
or congruousness of some objective condition with some impulse, habit, or
tendency of the agent, then, of course, pure pleasure is a myth. Any pleasure
is qualitatively unique, being precisely the harmony of one set of conditions
with its appropriate activity. The pleasure of eating is one thing; the pleasure
of hearing music, another; the pleasure of an amiable act, another; the plea-
sure of drunkenness or of anger is still another.”23
And Dewey continues,
Hence the possibility of absolutely different moral values attaching to plea-

sures, according to the type or aspect of character which they express. But if
the good is only a sum of pleasures, any pleasure, so far as it goes, is as good
as any other—the pleasure of malignity as good as the pleasure of kindliness,
simply as pleasure.24
Not only does Dewey anticipate the point made by Wolff and Nozick
that what we want in life is not mere feelings (otherwise we would choose
Nozick s experience machine) but the objective fulfillment of desire, capac-
ities, and efforts, but he also anticipates Nozick’s point that “what we are is
important to us.” As Dewey writes, “Not only the ‘good,’ but the more vig-
orous and hearty of the ‘bad,’ would scorn a life in which character, self-
hood, had no significance, and where the experimental discovery and testing
of destiny had no place.”25
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 257–258.
25. Ibid., 275.

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We have now seen one of the respects in which Bentham’s conception of

the general good is hopelessly defective (and hence the advice to use our
intelligence in “maximizing” it, so conceived, misdirects us: we seek to obey
Dewey’s injunction—the central injunction in his writing over a lifetime
that stretched from 1859 to 1952—to apply our intelligence to securing the
common good). The Benthamite good is a wholly fictitious “sum” of “plea-
sures” conceived as “homogenous in quality.” But the enjoyments and satis-
factions we actually want are not homogeneous in quality, and the notion of
simply “adding” them and seeing how large the “sum” is makes no sense.
In addition, if each agent is conceived (in Benthamite psychology, as
Dewey interprets it) as activated by the motive of its own “pleasure,” no
satisfactory account can be given of why the “pleasure” we take (all of us
some of the time, and a few of us most of the time) in the welfare of other
people, conceived simply as a feeling homogeneous with all of the other pleasures,
should override the other pleasures, even when great sacrifice or real tempta-
tions are involved. Here Dewey undertakes a fascinating critique of
Bentham’s notion of sympathy—we shall look at this critique shortly.
I have now recounted why Dewey cannot regard the utilitarians having
already satisfactorily anticipated his ethical demand for the application of
intelligence to ethical issues and problems. They are trapped, in his view, in
a hopeless philosophical anthropology. What of the Kantian?
Dewey versus Kant
Although part of Dewey’s criticism of Kant seems to be both right and im-
portant, I must confess that at other points Dewey’s treatment of Kant seems
to me excessively uncharitable.
The fact is, there are points at which Dewey himself sounds extremely
“Kantian.” Yet even at those points there are also subtle but all-important
differences from Kant. To set the stage for assessing both the similarities and
the differences, I need to consider Dewey’s view of sympathy (which means
returning, for a moment, to his critique of utilitarianism). Another reason
for considering Dewey’s remarks on this topic is that today there is a whole
school of thought (or rather a school of confusion) called “evolutionary psy-
chology” (formerly known as “sociobiology”) that likes to claim that it has
offered an evolutionary explanation of our moral lives when all it has offered

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is an account of the evolution of sympathetic feelings and sociable impulses.

No clearer account of the difference between moral lives and sympathetic
feelings has ever been written than the following words by Dewey:
Sympathy is a genuine natural instinct, varying in intensity in different indi-

viduals. It is a precious instrumentality for the development of social insight
and socialized affection; but in and of itself it is on the same plane as any natural
endowment [emphasis added]. It may lead to sentimentality or to selfishness;
the individual may shrink from scenes of misery just because of the pain they
cause him, or may seek jovial companions because of the sympathetic plea-
sures he gets. Or he may be moved by sympathy to labor for the good of
others, but, because of lack of deliberation and thoughtfulness, be quite igno-
rant of what their good really is, and do a great deal of harm. . . . Again in-
stinctive sympathy is partial: it may attach itself to those of blood kin or to
immediate associates in such a way as to favor them at the expense of others,
and lead to positive injustice toward those beyond the charmed circle.26
Needless to say, Dewey is not attacking sympathy as such. What he calls

for is a transformation of sympathy. Like Aristotle, he believes that the rea-
sons for being ethical are not apparent from a nonethical or preethical stand-
point; one must be educated into the ethical life, and this means that one’s
interests must be transformed. In that process, Dewey tells us, one does not
simply acquire an interest in helping other people alongside of and indepen-
dent of one’s various interests in art, in work, in recreation, etc.; rather all of
those interests are likewise transformed. How? In Dewey’s account, sympathy
is transformed by being “fused” with our other impulses, and our other impulses
and interests are transformed by being “fused” with sympathy. As he writes:
What is required is a blending, a fusing of the sympathetic tendencies with all

the other impulses and habitual traits of the self. When interest in power is
permeated with an affectionate impulse, it is protected from being a tendency
to dominate and tyrannize; it becomes an interest in effectiveness of regard for
common ends. When an interest in artistic or scientific objects is similarly
fused, it loses the indifferent and coldly impersonal character which marks the
specialist as such, and becomes an interest in the adequate aesthetic and intel-
lectual development of the conditions of a common life. Sympathy does not
26. Ibid., 271–272.

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merely associate one of these tendencies with another; still less does it make
one a means to the other’s end. It so intimately permeates them as to trans-
form them both into a single new and moral interest.27
And he concludes the section by writing, “It is sympathy transformed into a

habitual standpoint which satisfies the demand for a standpoint which will
render the person interested in foresight of all obscure consequences,” as
opposed to the untransformed natural instinct of sympathy to which
Bentham appealed.28
The reason that I see this as both like and unlike Kant is the following: on
the one hand, the person whose impulses have been transformed in this way,
the Deweyan moral person, automatically treats the ends of others as some-
thing other than mere means; he thinks in terms of “we” rather than simply
“me.” Thus he obeys the Kingdom of Ends formulation of Kant’s categorical
imperative. Kantian dualism of “reason” and “inclination” is rejected from
the beginning. “It is impossible to draw any fixed line between the content of
the moral good and of natural satisfaction. The end, the right and only right
end, of man, lies in the fullest and freest realization of powers in their appro-
priate objects. The good consists of friendship, family and political relations,
economic utilization of mechanical resources, science, art, in all their com-
plex and variegated forms and elements. Then is no separate and rival moral
good; no separate empty and rival ‘goodwill.’”29
Yet Kant’s categorical imperative in its more familiar form (act only on
such maxims as you would be willing to universalize) is not by any means
useless, in Dewey’s view. As he writes,
No sensible person would question the instructiveness of this scheme in the

concrete. It indicates that the value of reason—of abstraction and generaliza-
tion—in conduct is to help us escape from the partiality that flows from de-
sire and emotion in their first and superficial manifestations, and to attain a
more unified and permanent end. As a method (though not of course the only
one) of realizing the full meaning of a proposed course of action, nothing
could be better than asking ourselves how we should like to be committed
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 273.
29. Ibid.

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forever to its principle; how we should like to have others committed to it and
to treat us according to it? . . . In short, by generalizing a purpose we make its
general character evident.
But this method does not proceed (as Kant would have it) from a mere
consideration of moral law apart from a concrete end, but from an end in so far
as it persistently approves itself to reflection after an adequate survey of it in all its
bearings.30
In this last remark, Dewey follows an old (and uncharitable) interpreta-

tion of Kant, according to which our specific duties are supposed to follow,
almost deductively, from the categorical imperative. A more generous inter-
pretation on which the categorical imperative functions as a test, very much
in the way that Dewey describes, rather than as a single postulate from which
all of morality is to be derived, has long been defended by John Rawls and
by those influenced by him (including Barbara Herman and Christine
Korsgaard). But the point that the categorical imperative cannot be, for a
pragmatist, the sole test (or even, in every context, the best test) remains, as
does the repudiation of Kant’s dualist moral psychology.
One could go on and consider, as Dewey did, yet other schools with
which Dewey was familiar and with which we are familiar (e.g., ethical
intuitionism, which also makes moral motivation something ‘non-natural’
and hence mysterious). But I trust my point will have been made. If we
understand intelligence as Dewey did, as experimental intelligence directed
to the achievement of ends that are continuous with our biologically given
impulses, but not simply at the service of untransformed impulses (or
“pleasure”), then the idea that it is ethically important that we employ intel-
ligence in the pursuit of the common good is by no means an idea that “ev-
eryone already accepts.” Dewey has good reason to think that he is urging
something new as well as important. And to come back to our starting
point, if Dewey stresses the process I called “evaluation” in “The
Construction of Good” (and in many other places as well), it is because
evaluation is the essential step in applying intelligence to the pursuit of the
common good. But evaluation does not itself make us moral beings; it is
the transformation of character that Dewey described in the Ethics that is
supposed to do that.
30. Ibid., 283–284.

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Conclusion
Dewey thematized the application of intelligence to moral life throughout

his long philosophical career. In the present essay, I have mainly explored
one aspect of that thematization, his criticism of orthodox utilitarian con-
ceptions of what the application of intelligence to ethical problems consists
in. But of course Dewey also has positive things to say; in addition to the
account of moral motivation I have described, he has a conception of what
Westbrook suggested we call deliberative democracy. My aim here has not
been to give an exhaustive account of Dewey’s ethical theory but to further
our understanding of it by distinguishing it from the best-known ethical
theory, which might seem to make similar claims to having shown us how to
apply intelligence to our moral and political lives.

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19
Dewey’s Epistemology
Ruth Anna Putnam
IN THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY , Dewey described “the main problem of

modern philosophy” as follows: “How is science to be accepted and yet the
realm of values to be conserved.”1 He suggested that a solution to the prob-
lem would be found if the separation of theory and practice, presupposed by
philosophy since the days of Plato, were overcome. That task, he believed,
will be accomplished when the traditional spectator theory of knowledge is
replaced by a theory that regards the knower of the world as an agent in that
world. Such a theory will be a theory not of knowledge as fixed and im-
mutable but rather of knowledge as the upshot of inquiry as seen in the ex-
perimental sciences; it will, he promised, “cancel the isolation of knowledge
from overt action.”2
Once knowledge is seen to be not only compatible with action but re-
quiring action, it follows that the methods of inquiry that lead to knowledge
in science are also the methods by which judgments of practice, and hence
judgments of value, become known. Moreover, the methods of science are
continuous with methods of inquiry in everyday life. Thus, somewhat sur-
prisingly, Dewey, who sneered at an “alleged discipline of epistemology,”
found himself again and again developing, presenting, and defending his
instrumental theory of knowledge. The central sources are the essays he col-

2. Ibid., 38–39.

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lected in Essays in Experimental Logic (now scattered in several volumes of

the Middle Works of John Dewey), The Quest for Certainty, Logic: The Theory
of Inquiry, and finally “Experience, Knowledge and Value” in The Philosophy
of John Dewey.3
The Problem
Dewey’s formulation of the problem calls for considerable elaboration. How

do the discoveries of modern science call our values into question? They do
so only on a mistaken view of the relation of scientific objects (physical mag-
nitudes, atoms, etc.) to the objects of everyday life—middle-sized objects,
low-energy processes—what Dewey calls, sometimes, objects of use and en-
joyment and, at other times, qualitative objects. Therefore, Dewey cites a
second problem as equally central, namely, “the problem of the relation of
physical science to the things of ordinary experience.”4
Let us return, however, to “the main problem.” Following Dewey’s proce-
dure, let us ask how the problem has arisen, and let us be guided by the fact
that the popular version of the problem is said to be the conflict between
science and religion. Before the rise of modern science most philosophers as
well as everyone else took it for granted that the perceived qualities of things
were indeed qualities of things, not mental entities in the mind of the per-
ceiver. Indeed, things were distinguished from each other by their different
qualities. Things were used or misused, enjoyed or suffered, sought or
shunned. People recognized the fragility of the world they experienced, in-
cluding the fragility of the goods they pursued and the virtues of their fel-
lows on which they relied. They sought certainty and stability. Since, in this
world, good things do not last and good people die, they postulated another
world—Plato’s realm of Ideas, Christianity’s God and his heaven, the
Absolute of the idealists, etc. Knowledge of these transcendent entities was
said to be acquired by reasoning that involved no action, by intuition or by
revelation.
3. John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1916); Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in Later Works, vol. 12; and “Experience, Knowledge
and Value: A Rejoinder,” in Later Works, 14:3–90.

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DEWEY ’S EPISTEMOLOGY 295
Today, we speak of a conflict between science and religion when, for ex-
ample, religious people oppose the account of creation in the Bible to the
teachings of modern astrophysics or to the theory of evolution. In contrast,
according to Dewey, philosophers have been troubled by “the gap in kind
which exists between the fundamental principles of the natural world and
the reality of the values according to which mankind is to regulate its life.”5
Dewey opposes here scientific realism—the view that our best physical
theories are our best account of reality—to various types of idealism—the
view that Truth, Beauty, Good have Being beyond the temporal existence of
the commonsense world or the world of science. The gap vanishes, Dewey
maintains, when values are understood not as something to be known but
rather as something that guides conduct and when science is understood to
provide the means to realize (in this temporal world) more efficiently, more
securely the things we value. In other words, when theory and practice are
united.
More recently—say, for the past eighty years or so—the “gap” that some
philosophers find is known as the fact/value dichotomy—that is, that while
facts are objective and knowable, values are subjective or at best relative to a
given culture. Dewey’s argument is as relevant to this conception of the gap
as that prevailing earlier and perhaps recently reemerging.
When Dewey rails against the separation of theory and practice and the
undervaluing of the latter, he describes and criticizes views that were widely
held at the time of his writing. Pure science was valued more highly than
applied science, in spite of the fact that applied science and technology were
rapidly transforming the world. Today technology and applied science are
valued beyond pure science, if comparative value is measured by the size of
the investments governments are willing to make in these fields. In these
circumstances, Dewey, I am sure, would have adjusted his rhetoric to em-
phasize the importance of pure science. Dewey not only understood that
without advances in basic research applied science and technology come to
a standstill; he cherished the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake just as he
cherished the pursuit of beauty. In any case, it is a serious, though alas not
uncommon misreading of Dewey to say that he valued action over thought,
practice over theory. In fact, he held them to be so interdependent that the
question of the value of either in isolation makes no sense.
5. Ibid, 33.

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Truth
Let us see then how theory and practice are united in Dewey’s theory of
knowledge. According to Dewey, “thinking would not exist, and hence
knowledge would not be found, in a world which presented no troubles.”6
This relatively early formulation hints at the instrumentalist theory of
knowledge that he developed in the first decade of the last century and never
abandoned thereafter. It makes clear that for Dewey “thinking” refers not to
any kind of consciousness but only to what he calls reflective and inferential
thinking. Such thinking occurs in inquiry, and “the outcome of competent
and controlled inquiry” is knowledge or, as Dewey preferred to say, “war-
ranted assertibility.”7 That expression, he felt, points to the process of inquiry
that provides the warrant for a knowledge claim. It also reminds us that the
upshot of any particular inquiry is always provisional, subject to modifica-
tion as the result of subsequent inquiry. Dewey gave credit to C. S. Peirce for
this insight as well as for generally making inquiry a focal point of his logical
studies.8
Because, for Dewey, knowledge is warranted assertibility, it is sometimes
thought that he defined truth as warranted assertibility. Dewey must bear
some of the blame for this misinterpretation, for in the index to the Logic we
find under “truth” this: “defined 343 n. 6. See Assertibility Warranted.” In
the footnote referred to, Dewey says that the best definition of truth is that
given by C. S. Peirce, namely, “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately
agreed on by all who investigate is what we mean by truth, and the object
represented by this opinion is the real.” He then cites another passage from
Peirce that elaborates the definition just stated. “Truth is that concordance
of an abstract statement with the ideal limits toward which endless investi-
gation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract

7. Dewey, Logic, in Later Works, 12:15.
8. Peirce was one of the leading formal logicians of his time as well as, with William
James, a cofounder of pragmatism. It has become fashionable in recent decades to as-
sociate Dewey with James and to isolate Peirce. Without at all denying the importance
of Dewey’s relation to James, or James’s relation to Peirce, it is, I think, time for an-
other study of Dewey’s relation to Peirce. This chapter is, however, not the place for
such a study.

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statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and

one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth.”9 Truth
is not warranted assertibility, but we might say that it is the limit toward
which assertions tend as they are increasingly more fully warranted by scien-
tific investigation.
The Peirce-Dewey account of truth was scathingly criticized by Bertrand
Russell, who wondered why they believed that there is an “ideal limit to
which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief.”10 He asked
sarcastically whether the belief that such a limit exists is supposed to be an
empirical generalization, an optimistic belief in human perfectibility, a
prophecy, or a mere surmise concerning the opinions of ever cleverer scien-
tists. What Russell ignores is that for both Peirce and Dewey the method of
science is self-corrective or, as Dewey says, continuous. Thus human perfect-
ibility or scientists becoming cleverer is beside the point.
Nevertheless, there may be no “ideal limit,” no final “theory of every-
thing,” for various reasons, and even if there were such a theory, there would
be many truths that would not be part of the final opinion. Neither scientific
truths about particulars nor truths of everyday life, as, for example, that I am
now writing these words on a computer, are part of the final opinion.
Moreover, with respect to the latter and most, if not all, of the former truths,
we do not care that they are not part of the final opinion; they play their role
for us now. Dewey would say that they are effective or inadequate means in
the course of a particular inquiry and that the predicates “true” or “false” do
not apply to these propositions. While I agree with Dewey on the role such
propositions play, I also think that they are true or false.
In the introduction to the Essays in Experimental Logic Dewey likened the
correspondence said to hold between a (true) thought and reality to the re-
lation between an invention and the need it is intended to serve. A true hy-
pothesis, one might say, is like the key that fits a lock; it enables us to move
from an indeterminate situation into one that is determinate, not (pace
Russell) from feelings of doubt to feelings of certainty.
Dewey’s example of a man lost in the woods may clarify this last concep-
tion. The man, it is said, must have a true idea of his environment. Dewey
9. Dewey, Logic, in Later Works, 12:343 n6.

10. Bertrand Russell, “Dewey’s New Logic,” in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed.
P. A. Schilpp (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1939), 145.

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points out that the man does not need an idea of the perceived environment;
he needs an idea of the wider environment that contains his home and other
unperceived elements. Concerning this idea Dewey writes, “It is not some
little psychical entity or piece of consciousness-stuff, but is the interpretation
of the locally present environment in reference to its absent portion.”11 This idea
is, as Dewey points out, a plan of action. And if the man carries out the plan
and after some while finds himself at home, he may say that his idea agreed
with reality. This is the only sense Dewey can give to the notion of an agree-
ment between idea and reality. Only by acting upon an idea can we discover
whether it is adequate or not and how we might improve it. Moreover, only
consequences that are deliberately sought are relevant to its truth or falsity.
Thus, though the man might be pleasantly surprised to encounter his wife
by the way, this is irrelevant to the truth of his idea, while encountering a
landmark he had anticipated is relevant. This account of truth, as far as it
goes, is entirely in agreement with ordinary usage, but it is, of course, neither
a theory nor a definition of truth.
Knowledge
It is time to return to Dewey’s theory of knowledge. I have suggested that

Dewey’s theory of knowledge is in fact his theory of inquiry, his “logic,” al-
though I acknowledge that his theory of inquiry is more than a theory of
knowledge. It includes his metaphysics, his theory of language, his theory of
mind, and his philosophy of science. Again and again Dewey points out that
there is continuity between inquiry in science and inquiry in ordinary life.
While I intend to emphasize the latter, it will be impossible to avoid refer-
ring to the former.
Although in the opening chapter of his Logic Dewey followed Peirce in
holding that inquiry is prompted by doubt, his preferred formulation is
“Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situa-
tion into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as
to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole.” 12 While
11. Dewey, Middle Works, 4:83–84 (emphasis in original).

12. Dewey, Logic, in Later Works, 12:108 (emphasis in original).

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doubt is subjective, an indeterminate situation is objective, and that is im-

portant. Dewey rejects the absolute idealist’s notion of knowledge as a state
of mind. Knowing is a relation between a world and a self (an intelligent
organism) who is not merely a knower but stands in multiple relations to
multiple things in that world—for example, as an eater of fish or a maker of
shoes. Dewey speaks of an indeterminate situation because we always expe-
rience things or events in a wider context, a situation. To be sure, we gener-
ally focus attention on a particular item, but it is the item-in-that-situation
to which we respond appropriately or inappropriately. A situation is indeter-
minate if it may develop in more than one way depending on what a suitably
placed agent may do.
The upshot of inquiry is here said to be a unified or determinate situation,
one whose further development can be confidently predicted, or a situation
that is understood, or a situation that is enjoyed (or suffered). The inquirer
who brings this about is said to have knowledge; thus Dewey also says that
knowledge is the outcome of controlled inquiry. Such knowledge is medi-
ated knowledge, and for Dewey it is the only kind of knowledge. In contrast,
many philosophers have held that some a priori propositions are intuited—
that is, known immediately. Many philosophers have held that the objects of
perception, whatever they may be, are known immediately. Dewey denies
that there is any immediate knowledge. I shall consider each case in turn.
Immediate Knowledge
Let us begin with some general considerations. Dewey is well aware that
his denial of immediate knowledge runs counter both to common inter-
pretations of acknowledged facts and to an argument as old as Aristotle’s
writings. The argument holds that inference leads to known conclusions
only if it begins with known premises. Hence, to avoid an infinite regress,
there must be premises that are known immediately. Since known prem-
ises and conclusions are true, Dewey’s first response is to point out that
true conclusions can follow from premises that are false—that is, not
known. But that reply is not adequate, for such conclusions, though true,
are not known, at least not on the basis of such an inference alone. Dewey’s
more adequate response is to point to the history of science. Again and
again quite inaccurate hypotheses have stimulated research that disclosed

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more fruitful evidence. Such hypotheses are not known, hence not imme-
diately known, yet the ultimate result of the research they prompt is
knowledge in Dewey’s, though perhaps not in Aristotle’s, sense. In short,
the existence of immediate knowledge cannot be proven by what purports
to be an indispensability argument.
Be that as it may, there are certain facts that seem to make a prima facie
case for immediate knowing. We are not newborns; we bring to every in-
quiry the results of previous inquiries, and these are used without further
reflection. “This immediate use of objects known in consequence of previous
mediation is readily confused with immediate knowledge.”13 An example, to
which I shall return below, is the case of recognizing a previously perceived
object. Thus we say, quite correctly, “I recognized him immediately” and “I
saw at a glance that it was a golden retriever” while ready to agree that the
knowledge is the result of prior experience.
Another example of seemingly immediate but actually mediated knowl-
edge is this. Dewey notes that in the course of inquiry certain estimates,
appraisals, or evaluations occur. Data are judged to be relevant, or reliable;
certain theories are judged to be applicable to the case in question; suggested
hypotheses may be judged to be plausible, etc. Dewey does not emphasize
that these are value judgments, but in fact he points here to what I have
called the entanglement of facts and values.14 That entanglement is itself an
aspect of the unity of theory and practice that Dewey seeks to establish.
However, the relevance of mentioning these appraisals here is this. “As soon
as it is forgotten that they are means, and their value is determined by their
efficiency as operative means, they appear to be objects of immediate knowl-
edge instead of being means of attaining knowledge.”15 I find this last remark
puzzling; such judgments of epistemic value seem to me to be obviously the
result of reflection. What Dewey wants to deny is that these “means of at-
taining knowledge” are knowledge, hence a fortiori not immediate knowl-
edge. Like the particular propositions mentioned above, appraisals are more
or less adequate to the task at hand.
13. Ibid., 143.

15. Dewey, Logic, in Later Works, 12:143.

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A Priori Knowledge
Inquiry, as we have already had occasion to remark, is continuous. In every

inquiry it may be taken for granted that many propositions are not the subject
of this inquiry. For example, one takes it for granted that the instruments used
are reliable and that one is justified in making use of already well-established
scientific theories. Everyone knows and agrees that these propositions are em-
pirical and that knowledge of them is the result of earlier inquiries—that is, it
is not immediate, however immediately it now comes to mind.
But there are other propositions, for example, that space is three-dimen-
sional, that other philosophers have taken to be known a priori but that
Dewey takes to be warranted by thousands of years of successful use in in-
quiry. They seem to us (adult human beings) immediately known because
we too have used them already in numerous inquiries. And yet new situa-
tions may arise which challenge these received truths, as Einstein’s theory of
general relativity challenges the “a priori” truth that space is euclidean.
Failure to be prepared for such an eventuality will block inquiry.
Still, one may want to ask, “What about mathematical truths?” Dewey’s
short answer is that mathematical theories from simple arithmetic to the
most abstract are means, highly abstract means, that enable thinking—that
is, inference. The axioms of a mathematical theory are not immediately
known truths; “they are postulates adopted because of what follows from
them.”16 In other words, they are neither truths nor objects of knowledge.
Nevertheless Dewey appreciated mathematics also for its own sake, as the
following shows. “Mathematics and formal logic thus mark highly special-
ized branches of intellectual industry, whose working principles are very
similar to those of works of fine art. The trait that strikingly characterizes
them is combination of freedom with rigor—freedom with respect to
development of new operations and ideas; rigor with respect to formal com-
possibilities.”17 From the perspective of a theory of inquiry, mathematical
concepts and theories are of interest when they find application in everyday
life, in physics, or in other sciences. But Dewey recognized and appreciated
the play of mathematical ideas just as he appreciated the play of works of art
and the importance of so-called pure science.
16. Ibid., 144.

17. Ibid., 128.

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Perception
In his reply to his critics in The Philosophy of John Dewey, written in 1938,
Dewey remarks that he has spent the last thirty-five years of his life develop-
ing his present philosophical views. Neither his critics in that volume nor he
himself seem to take any interest in his earlier idealism, except as one of a
number of views he opposes. I shall follow in his footsteps and deal only
with his pragmatist views.18
It is useful to begin with Dewey’s 1905 essay “The Postulate of Immediate
Empiricism.”19 In that paper Dewey asserts—this is the postulate of imme-
diate empiricism—that things are what they are experienced as. Different peo-
ple will experience the same thing differently; thus a child finds a more or
less triangular stone with rather sharp edges, an archeologist finds an arrow-
head. Their experiences differ, but the difference is not one between “Reality”
and “Appearance,” and both may experience the object as useful for digging
a hole in the sand.
It follows from the postulate that things are what they are known as. But,
unless all experiencing is knowing, it does not follow that Reality is known
by an All-Knower, or even known piecemeal by various finite knowers. If
knowing is but one sort of experiencing among others, as Dewey holds, then
we can ask what sort of experiencing it is, or how a thing as known differs
from that thing as, say, enjoyed. For example, a noise startles and frightens
me; it is a fear of some thing. I investigate and find that it is made by a win-
dow shade flapping in the wind; it is no longer fearsome.
Dewey emphatically makes two points here: (1) the earlier experience is
not a knowing (or cognizing) experience; it would be incorrect to describe it
as “I know that I am frightened by a noise.” The correct description is just “I
am frightened by a noise.” The later experience is a knowing experience,
correctly described as, “Now I know the flapping window shade makes the
noise.” In short, knowledge results from inquiry. (2) The postulate of imme-
diate empiricism offers a method of philosophical analysis that, like the
method of science, sends one to experience.
18. For an alternative interpretation that takes full account of Dewey’s early ideal-
ism, see J. R. Shook, Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality (Nashville,
TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000).
19. Dewey, Middle Works, 3:158–167.

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What then do we experience in our various experiences? The short answer

is “objects of use and enjoyment,” a phrase that includes misuse and suffer-
ing or undergoing. To put it another way, Dewey is a naïve realist in the
sense that what we experience or perceive are the things of the commonsense
world. He is emphatically opposed to what we now call an interface concep-
tion of perception, whether or not the interpolated entities are thought of as
mental, physical, or neutral.
Perception, for Dewey, is a physical interaction between an organism and
its environment. Every word here requires comment. Perception is an inter-
action. That is, perceivers are not spectators, not passive receivers of impres-
sions or sense data or presentations of their environment; perceivers are
agents/patients in their environment. Again, perceivers are organisms, more
or less intelligent organisms, not minds. Such a perceiver may enjoy or suf-
fer, may manipulate or undergo being manipulated by some feature of the
environment without thought. If so, there is perception but not knowledge.
Thus one may enjoy “without thinking” the sensation in one’s throat as one
drinks a glass of cool water on a hot summer day. Even when there is think-
ing—when, for example, one is making an effort with the aid of a reference
book to identify an unfamiliar plant—there are numerous things in one’s
perceptual field that one does not think about or know.
Why is it important for Dewey to insist that perception is not per se cog-
nition? Because that view leads to intractable problems. Consider the case of
one’s perception of a distant star. From the point of view of what Dewey calls
naïve realism—that is, from his point of view—there is no problem; there is
a physical process that began light years ago with light emitted by the star
and ends with the light now impinging on my retina and setting certain in-
ternal processes in motion. This happens whether or not I know anything
about the speed of light or the processes within my body. Again, one may be
awestruck by the starry heavens, one may use the stars to navigate, or they
may be merely part of the total situation in which one talks philosophy with
one’s friend. Of course, nothing just said denies that there is a science of as-
tronomy and that astronomers have knowledge of (some) stars.
Dewey raises the following difficulties with rival views: Idealists hold that
the seen light is a mental event. If so, Dewey wonders, would a photograph
of the star be something psychical? Presentative realists (Dewey’s label) ac-
cept the physical explanation (that light travels at a finite speed), yet they
treat perceiving as a kind of knowing—that is, as something other than a

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simple physical-biological event. What then, according to these realists, are

we said to know when we see a star? The star is the cause of knowledge, but
the seen light seems to be the object known. Yet the star is said to be the real
object, contrasting it to the “less real” seen light that merely “presents” the
star. Again, were one to claim that one knows the star, one would have to
know the velocity of the emitted light (and any other characteristics of the
star), but these are not known in perception. In other words, according to
Dewey, the fact that we see distant stars, together with the claim that to see
a thing is to know the thing, and that to know a thing is to know some char-
acteristic of it, gives rise to intractable problems. Therefore, Dewey rejects
the hypothesis that perceiving is knowing, acknowledging, however, that his
own view is also a hypothesis.
Dewey appeals to ordinary, that is, nonphilosophical, understanding as
evidence for his hypothesis (i.e., the hypothesis that perceiving is not cogni-
tive). “The plain man, for a surety, does not regard noises heard, lights seen,
etc., as mental existences; but neither does he regard them as things known.”20
The point is not that the ordinary person does not say that he knows the
noise (i.e., that he knows the flapping of the window shade); rather, the
point is that the attitude of ordinary people to these things is not that of a
knower. “He is in the attitude of a liker or a hater, a doer or an appreciator.
When he takes the attitude of a knower he begins to inquire.”21
A further difficulty with the spectator theory of knowing is the following.
If our only relationship to the world is that of a spectator, there is no way we
can tell whether something merely appears to have a certain quality or
whether it actually has that quality. In other words, skepticism concerning
the external world is then inescapable.
What, then, is the relation of perceptions to “the unquestionable case of
knowledge, the logical or inferential case”? Dewey replies, “They [perceptions]
are the sole ultimate data, the sole media, of inference to all natural objects and
processes. While we do not, in any intelligible or verifiable sense, know them,
we know all things that we do know with or by them. They furnish the only
ultimate evidence of the existence and nature of the objects which we infer,
and they are the sole ultimate checks and tests of the inferences.”22
20. Ibid., 6:108.

21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 109.

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Furthermore, in daily life perceptions function as signs of other percep-

tions to come, and where this occurs regularly and frequently, the sign-value
may become the dominant quality of the perception—for example, certain
noises become language; familiar objects are recognized at a glance. “Thus,
for practical purposes, many perceptual events are cases of knowledge; that is,
they have been used as such so often that the habit of so using them is estab-
lished or automatic.”23
It would, however, be clearer to say, as Dewey does say in Logic, that we
apprehend the things of the commonsense world and their qualities and that
we understand a word or a concept. We do, as adults, directly understand
what the common words of our language mean; that understanding is ac-
quired as a child learns its mother tongue. In just this way, according to
Dewey, past repeated experience with a thing will enable us to recognize it
“at a glance” as, say, binoculars, or to identify the noise immediately as a
flapping window shade. Such apprehension may be followed by an immedi-
ate response—the binoculars are used to determine whether a distant object
is our long-awaited friend. Or the object may be simply noted as part of an
inquiry, but in the latter case there is no guarantee that it will prove to be
relevant.
What then do we apprehend? We apprehend the objects and the qualities
of the objects of the commonsense world. We apprehend their primary, sec-
ondary, and tertiary qualities. For it is by their qualities that we distinguish
one object from another. As already mentioned, we do not apprehend ob-
jects in isolation but rather as parts of an environment—an extended spatio-
temporal field that is usually taken for granted. For Dewey, a theory of
knowledge will fail if it takes isolated objects as data, as given in experience,
rather than as taken, as the result of conceptual or physical manipulation of
the indeterminate situation. As given, objects stand in multiple relations to
each other and to us.
One final word concerning perception and concerning the failure of
other theories of knowledge is in order. Dewey responded at length to
Bertrand Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World: As a Field for
Scientific Method in Philosophy.24 In that work Russell asked whether the ex-
23. Ibid., 110.

24. Dewey, “The Existence of the World as a Logical Problem,” in Middle Works,
8:83–97.

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istence of anything other than our data of sense can be inferred from their
existence. Russell then offered a complex construction—a correlation of cor-
relations of sense data—as equivalent to a physical object, say, a table. Dewey
pointed out that in the very statement of the problem as well as in the con-
struction of his response Russell repeatedly takes for granted the spatiotem-
poral world that he supposedly called into question.
Moreover, psychology has rejected the assumption that infants experience
discrete objects of sense (color patches, sounds, etc.):
According to Mr. James, for example, the original datum is large but confused
and specific sensible qualities represent the result of discrimination. . . . That
knowledge grows from a confusedly experienced external world to a world
experienced as ordered and specified would then be the teaching of psycho-
logical science, but at no point would the mind be confronted with the prob-
lem of inferring a world.25
Dewey concludes, “It is not the common-sense world which is doubtful, or

which is inferential, but common-sense as a complex of beliefs about specific
things and relations in the world. Hence never in any actual procedure of
inquiry do we throw the existence of the world into doubt, nor can we do so
without self-contradiction.”26
Science and Experience
Let us recall that for Dewey the central problem of philosophy is to restore
“integration and cooperation” between “beliefs about the nature of things
due to natural science [and] beliefs about values—using that word to desig-
nate whatever is taken to have rightful authority in the direction of con-
duct.”27 He sees another “main problem” as “the problem of the relation of
physical science to the things of ordinary experience.”28 The problems are, of
course, related since the things we desire, enjoy, and value are the things of
25. Ibid., 94–95.

26. Ibid., 96–97.
27. Ibid., 204.
28. Dewey, “Experience, Knowledge and Value,” 8–9.

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ordinary experience. The problems exist, Dewey believes, because of a long

tradition, already mentioned above, which valued so-called pure knowledge
(or knowing that something is the case) over applied knowledge (or knowing
how to do something). Or we might say that the tradition valued thinking
over doing, the “activity” of the leisure class over that of the common people.
In a contemporary version, what is known by scientists is taken to be what
is real as opposed to the less real qualities of commonsense objects. Or,
again, the tradition models knowing on seeing, where it is characteristic of
seeing that it leaves the seen object untouched.
In contrast, Dewey will model knowing, that is, coming to know, on the
procedures of the experimental natural sciences. With the rise of modern sci-
ence the notion of experience underwent a change—or rather we have now
two notions of experience, for the older one also persists. What is known “by
experience” in the older notion is a haphazard collection based on fortuitous
discoveries; it is not, properly speaking, knowledge, since its objects (what is
said to be known) are not understood. In the newer notion what is known by
experience is what is learned from deliberately conducted experiments. Such
knowledge is relatively stable—the experiments can be repeated by any com-
petent person—but only relatively, for we must not forget that scientists are
always willing to revise their beliefs in the light of new evidence.
Dewey notes three traits of experimental inquiry: (1) experimentation
involves doing, manipulation of the environment or, at least, of the experi-
menter’s relation to it; (2) experimentation is guided by ideas, that is, by
hypotheses relevant to the problem that prompted the inquiry; (3) “The
outcome of the directed activity is the construction of a new empirical situ-
ation in which objects are differently related to each other, and such that the
consequences of directed operation have the property of being known.”29
Dewey contrasts Greek science, which fits comfortably with common
sense since both are qualitative, with post-Galilean science which, he holds,
abolished qualities as traits of scientific objects, thus giving rise to the “con-
flict and need for reconciliation between the scientific properties of the real
and those which give moral authority.”30 The statement might be misread as
holding that the properties which give moral authority are not properties of
29. Ibid. Dewey quotes himself; see Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, in Later Works,
4:201, 204.

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real things. That is not Dewey’s intention. Only if one assumes that knowing
is the only mode of experiencing, a view Dewey, as we have seen, emphati-
cally rejected, would one be forced to conclude that, since scientific objects
have no qualities, the world is valueless. “A philosophy which holds that we
experience things as they really are apart from knowing, and that knowledge
is a mode of experiencing things which facilitates control of objects for pur-
poses of non-cognitive experiences will come to another conclusion.”31
Namely, it leads to the conclusion that “[physics] substitutes data for ob-
jects.”32 But this must not be understood ontologically as denuding the
world of qualities. What Dewey is saying is, quite simply, that scientists
measure things and that, for the most part, they deal with measured quanti-
ties and with correlations between these.
Thus, if a sick person takes her temperature, she substitutes a datum for the
quality of being hot, a datum that, together with other data, will be used by
the physician to arrive at a diagnosis. That, in turn, enables the physician to
prescribe a course of treatment that leads to the patient’s recovery, or, alas,
sometimes not. When the patient recovers, her recovery verifies (confirms) the
diagnosis and the appropriateness of the treatment. In this case, quite literally,
a problematic situation—a situation of imbalance, as Dewey likes to say—is
transformed into a settled or balanced one. But the upshot of the inquiry, the
healthy patient, is as qualitative as was the earlier feverish, uncomfortable one.
Data are something to be thought about; they are not the upshot of the
inquiry. Measurement of change enables scientists to discover correlations of
changes and thus to develop means to control change. But the point of all
this is ultimately to secure enjoyment and prevent suffering—that is, con-
summatory, not cognitive, experiences.
Although Dewey is a naturalist and a naïve (that is, a commonsense) re-
alist, he is not a scientific realist, though neither is he a scientific antirealist
(see below). We can, and in inquiry we do, abstract from the qualities of
objects. Measurement, chemical analysis, taking X-rays are all ways of re-
placing an ordinary qualitative object by “data,” as subject matter for inquiry.
The concepts we use in science, Dewey believed, following Bridgman, are
“synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.” 33 There is not a dupli-
31. Ibid., 79.

32. Ibid.

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cate scientific world; these are only different ways of thinking about the
world. “The physical object, as scientifically defined, is not a duplicated real
object, but is a statement, as numerically definite as is possible, of the rela-
tions between sets of changes the qualitative object sustains with changes in
other things—ideally of all things with which interaction might under any
circumstances take place.”34
Dewey rejects the accusation that he is a scientific antirealist. When he
said that the perceived and used table is the only table, he did not deny the
existence of a swarm of molecules in rapid motion, “but [only] the notion
that the swarm somehow constitutes a ghostly kind of table.”35 Relative to
different kinds of problems both the perceived table and the swarm of mol-
ecules may be objects of knowledge.
It would be beside the point to offer here a critique of operationalism. It is,
by now, beyond dispute that it is too simple an account of the meaning of
scientific concepts. Yet scientific inquiry can still be seen as leading from a
problem that arises in the commonsense world to a solution that has applica-
tion in that world and is verified by those applications. Thus, an appreciation
of science, even of scientific research pursued for long periods entirely for its
own sake, does not force one to deny the reality of the commonsense world.
Even if only scientific inquiries lead to knowledge properly so called, we have,
as Dewey tirelessly pointed out, other experiences, other interactions with a
world that is as we experience it—that is, shot through with values.
Judgments of Practice
Dewey’s second problem, that of the relation of scientific objects to the

things of ordinary experience, has, I believe, been adequately answered.
There remains the first problem, that of integrating “beliefs about the na-
ture of things due to natural science [and] beliefs about values—using that
word to designate whatever is taken to have rightful authority in the direc-
tion of conduct.”36 Here the emphasis is on “beliefs.” Dewey provides mul-
tiple answers.
34. Ibid., 105.

35. Ibid., 22.
36. Ibid., 204.

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First, as we have seen again and again, he holds that the things of experi-
ence are as they are experienced; that is, things are frightful, soothing, repul-
sive, attractive, etc., just as they are blue or sweet, large or triangular. These
are “real qualities of natural objects. This view forms the only complete and
unadulterated realism.”37 That a thing is red does not suffice to identify it as
a tulip; just because a thing is attractive does not suffice to identify it as
good. But in both cases the experienced quality may prompt an inquiry that
leads to the conclusion that the red thing is (or is not) a tulip and the attrac-
tive thing is (or is not) good. More will be said below about the second kind
of inquiry.
Second, Dewey reminds us again that nature, or our situation in nature,
is precarious although there are also stable elements. It is precisely the com-
bination of the stable and the precarious that enables us to intervene, to
avert danger or secure safety—in short, to act to bring about a settled situa-
tion. Here, somewhat suddenly, Dewey remarks, “If it be admitted that
knowing is something which occurs within nature, then it follows as a tru-
ism that knowing is an existential overt act.”38 If so, becoming known does
something to or alters the object that becomes known. If so, knowledge is
not—a point often made by Dewey—knowledge of an antecedent reality. In
fact, the object of knowledge is always a hypothesis concerning the future.
Surely, this must be an exaggeration. Donald Piatt, of whose interpreta-
tion Dewey thought highly, remarked that while one must acknowledge that
in an experimental process one alters antecedent existence, one must also
admit that “the purpose of knowledge in using experiment in science and
largely in practical life is to discover what exists and antecedently existed
apart from the experiment.”39 Piatt believed that a careful reading of Dewey’s
texts would support his contention.
Let us return to Dewey’s claim that knowing is an overt existential act. It
would have been clearer had he said that coming to know, inquiring, is an
overt existential act, indeed a series of such acts. The acts performed in the
course of an inquiry are “intelligent”; that is, they aim to realize a purpose—
the transformation of an indeterminate situation into a determinate one—
and they are directed by knowledge of relevant laws of nature and of facts
37. Ibid., 191.

38. Ibid., 195.
39. Donald Piatt, “Dewey’s Logical Theory,” in The Philosophy of John Dewey, 108.

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particular to the situation in question. What has just been said is true pri-
marily of inquiry in physics and other natural sciences. It is, however, the
model for all successful inquiry and for all successful attempts to solve a
problem. Hence, it is a model also for social and political problems. Dewey
bemoans the fact that in these areas we fall far short of the ideal and that
our practice is regulated by “tradition, self-interest and accidental circum-
stances.”40
Human life, we have said, is shot through with intelligent action. Such
action follows upon a “judgment of practice”—for example, “I had better
take the bus,” “He should spend more time on his studies,” “It is wise to
exercise,” etc. Such judgments, Dewey remarks, are judgments about an in-
complete situation in which the agent is simply one feature among many
that are relevant to further developments. Because moral judgments have
been thought to be exclusively about the agent while judgments of practice
are about an agent, a situation, and the agent in that situation, Dewey feels
compelled to say, “If the genuine existence of such propositions [judgments
of practice] be admitted, the only question about moral judgments is
whether or no they are cases of practical judgments as the latter have been
defined—a question of utmost importance for moral theory.”41
In contrast to mere descriptions of a given situation, practical judgments
are a factor in its development. They suppose that there is a better and a
worse outcome (or several) and assert that a certain course of action will
contribute to the better. They also presuppose or contain an account of the
resources for and obstacles to the proposed course of action and its end-in-
view.
Dewey holds that any factual proposition that is made the basis of an
inference becomes thereby a hypothetical proposition—that is, open to ver-
ification or falsification by the occurrence or nonoccurrence of the conse-
quences it predicts. Dewey concludes that, therefore, the truth or falsehood
of a practical judgment is constituted by the outcome of intelligent action in
accordance with it. In other words, for judgments of practice truth is verifi-
cation. In fact, Dewey goes further than this, at least tentatively. “We may
frame at least a hypothesis that all judgments of fact have reference to a de-

41. Dewey, “The Logic of Judgments of Practice,” in Middle Works, 8:16.

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termination of courses of action to be tried and to the discovery of means for

their realization.”42 In short, any factual statement may be action-guiding,
and any action-guiding statement is verified/falsified by the outcome of in-
telligent action based on it. While I would not wish to identify truth with
verification, and what has just been said is far too simplistic to fit most cases
in which judgments of practice are to be evaluated—consider evaluating the
latest immigration policy of the United States government—the significant
point, it seems to me, is that judgments of practice are capable of confirma-
tion/disconfirmation. Since judgments of practice are value judgments
(judging a goal as worth pursuing, or a means as promising success), at least
such value judgments are knowable in the same way as any other empirical
proposition.
Can one say that all judgments of value are practical? Dewey distin-
guishes, usefully, between experiencing something as a good and judging it
to be good, just as we distinguish between railroad tracks experienced as
converging and judged to be parallel. Dewey was a behaviorist: he character-
izes finding a thing good, as opposed to judging it to be good, as “hanging
on to it, dwelling upon it, welcoming it and acting to perpetuate its pres-
ence, taking delight in it,” and having a noncognitive attitude toward it.43 In
contrast, judging that a thing is good is like any other judgment (e.g., like
judging that it is a horse or a case of scarlet fever). Dewey described this
distinction variously as distinguishing prizing from appraising, or valuing
from evaluating.
What then is the outcome of an inquiry into values? Dewey wrote,
“Judgments about values are judgments about the conditions and the results
of experienced objects; judgments about that which should regulate the forma-
tion of our desires, affections and enjoyments.”44 This is not the place to
present or examine Dewey’s theory of value, let alone his moral philoso-
phy. The only question of concern to us is whether his theory of knowl-
edge provides a solution to what he considered to be the main problem of
modern philosophy—namely, how to preserve the authority of the values
that guide our lives in an age that gives supreme cognitive authority to
science.
42. Ibid., 22.

43. Ibid., 26.
44. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, in Later Works, 4:212 (emphasis in original).

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Dewey’s answer, I believe, consists in showing that the practice of mod-

ern—that is, experimental—science is shot through with action, with deliber-
ate transformation of (parts of) the situation that has prompted inquiry. Such
action is not random; it is intelligent—that is, guided by judgments of practice
that make use of the outcomes of earlier experiments. In other words, modern
science has closed the gap between theory and practice. Moreover, the out-
come of an experiment is a test not only of the hypothesis/theory that pre-
dicted (or failed to predict) that outcome but of the value judgment that the
experiment is worth doing, and that it had better be done. Moreover, we noted
earlier that throughout an inquiry we evaluate data as reliable or relevant, the-
ories as applicable to the case in hand, etc. In short, modern science, far from
doing without value judgments, depends on them all the time.
Still, what has been said so far shows only that value judgments are means
to the reconstruction of a problematic situation. As means they are effective or
ineffective, adequate or inadequate. But, on reflection, one realizes that all
judgments are in the last analysis means to a noncognitive experience. In other
words, judgments of practice including moral judgments are in this respect on
a par with scientific judgments. The real problem for Dewey, as opposed to the
artificial problem of the status of values in a scientific world, is this:
What revisions and surrenders of current beliefs about authoritative ends and
values are demanded by the method and conclusions of natural science? What
possibilities of controlled transformation of the content of present belief and
practice in human institutions are indicated by the control of natural energies
which natural science has effected? These questions are as genuine and imper-
ative as the traditional problem is artificial and futile.45
45. Ibid., 201–202.

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20
Dewey’s Faith
Ruth Anna Putnam
ONCE HE HAD abandoned both the faith of his childhood and absolute
idealism, Dewey rejected all forms of supernaturalism, a position he main-
tained for the rest of his life. Dewey was a naturalist in two senses. He held
that no appeal to nonnatural or supernatural entities, beings, or powers
could legitimately play a role in dealing with philosophical problems. That,
of course, was and is the position of the overwhelming majority of post–
World War I philosophers, at least in Europe and the English-speaking
world. Philosophers did not and do not feel obliged to defend that position;
it was and is taken for granted.
Dewey was a naturalist also in a second, more profound, and thus more
controversial sense. He held that a belief in a supernatural being had perni-
cious effects on one’s ability to deal with social or personal problems. On the
one hand such beliefs, especially as part of a historical religion, give rise to
theological problems that cause brilliant minds to spend their time trying to
solve these problems instead of dealing with the practical problems of their
times. Thus, in particular, they reflected and disputed about “The Problem
of Evil” instead of seeking ways to deal with the particular evils they actually
faced. On the other hand, it seemed to Dewey that if one believed that the
deity is both omniscient and all powerful and intervenes in the world’s af-
fairs, one would either, from a sense of total helplessness, become despon-

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DEWEY ’S FAITH 315
dent, or else become indolent from believing that a good deity would take
care of all problems.1
Of course, not all religions are deterministic, not all conceptions of a
deity are of an omniscient, omnipotent Being who acts in the world, but
Dewey thinks particularly of Christian, and specifically of Calvinist concep-
tions. These are deterministic and, as he points out near the end of A
Common Faith, committed to a separation of the damned and the saved.
Dewey is moved to exclaim, “I cannot understand how any realization of the
democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in human affairs is pos-
sible without surrender of the conception of the basic division to which su-
pernatural Christianity is committed.” And then he adds, a point to which
we shall return later, “Whether or no we are, save in some metaphorical
sense, all brothers, we are at least all in the same boat traversing the same
turbulent ocean. The potential religious significance of this fact is infinite.”2
The final remark comes as a surprise. What does a naturalist mean by
“religious” or why should he care about religious significance? Indeed, why
would Dewey at age seventy-five produce a book that some characterize as
his philosophy of religion? I believe that Dewey would have preferred to
speak of his philosophy of religious experience, for he values religious expe-
rience while opposing religions.
What then is the difference between a religion, any religion, and an aspect of
experience that Dewey called religious? For my purposes here, let us follow
Dewey in defining a religion, say, Christianity, Islam, animism, etc., as an
instantiation of the Oxford Dictionary definition of “religion” quoted by
Dewey—namely, “Recognition on the part of man of some unseen higher
power as having control of his destiny and as being entitled to obedience,
reverence and worship.”3 A religion in this sense is an institution that in-
volves, among other things, a creed, that is, a body of beliefs that are ac-
1. An analogous argument was worked out in great detail by William James in “The
Dilemma of Determinism,” in The Will to Believe, in Works, vol. 6.
2. Dewey, A Common Faith, in Later Works, 9:3–59, 56.
3. Ibid., 4.

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cepted on the basis of some authority, ultimately on the basis of revelation.

This is a crude characterization, but for our purposes it will suffice. A reli-
gion also involves rites and ceremonies. I believe that these are of consider-
able importance in the life of a faith community, but they are not the targets
of Dewey’s critique.
The multiplicity of conceptions of the higher powers, of what counts as
obedience and worship, and of the motivation for these is cited by Dewey as
a reason, among others, to reject all of these conceptions. But the fact that
some sort of religious conception is found in almost all human societies
suggests, though Dewey does not say so explicitly, that experiences appropri-
ately called “religious” are found in virtually all communities. He believes,
moreover, that this aspect of experience is enormously valuable and would
be even more valuable as well as more widely, indeed universally, accessible,
if it were freed from all connection to the traditional religions and to belief
in the supernatural.
What then is the great value of the religious aspect or function in experi-
ence? Before he responds to this question, Dewey is concerned to distinguish
his view from that of philosophers or theologians who appeal to the fact that
individuals have religious experiences—that is, experiences they describe as
awareness of the presence of God, as evidence of the existence of a supernat-
ural deity. One cannot help but think of William James’s Varieties of Religious
Experience.4 But Dewey does not mention James, and, indeed, James does
not claim that the numerous religious experiences he discusses prove the
existence of a deity as conceived by Protestant Christians or, indeed, by ad-
herents of any other religion. James is not a Christian, but he is also not a
naturalist. Religious experiences are, he holds, evidence for the existence of
the divine, that is, some superhuman consciousness, but not for what he
calls “over-beliefs” concerning its nature. But I digress.
Dewey offers an example of the kind of reasoning he rejects. An unnamed
author asserts, “I resolved to stop drawing upon myself so continuously and
begin drawing upon God.” He then describes a daily routine of meditation
and concludes, “That was thirty years go. Since then I have had literally not
one hour of darkness or despair.”5 Dewey agrees that the episode “illustrates
4. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in Works, vol. 13.

5. Dewey, A Common Faith, in Later Works, 9:10.

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a religious aspect of experience” but insists that it is the man’s Christian up-
bringing that causes him to interpret his experience in terms of a personal
God whose existence is then said to be proved by the experience. All that is
proved by the experience, objects Dewey, is the existence of a complex of
(natural) conditions that have brought about a reorientation followed by an
inner peace. Strictly speaking, then, it would seem to be this complex of
natural conditions to which the word “God” refers when the man says that
he began to draw upon God, although, of course, that is not what the man
means. As we shall see later, neither is it what the word “God” means for
Dewey.
Let us return to Dewey’s characterization of religious experience. He
writes, “The actual religious quality in the experience described is the effect
produced, the better adjustment in life and its conditions, not the manner
and cause of its production.”6 It is, of course, this effect that Dewey finds so
valuable. To put it succinctly, Dewey holds that if an experience leads to a
dramatic and lasting positive readjustment in one’s attitude to life, one has
had a religious experience, and such an adjustment is immensely valuable.
Dewey speaks here from his own experience. As mentioned by Rockefeller,
as a young man reading Wordsworth, Dewey had what he later called a
“mystic experience.” Rockefeller describes it as “blissful” and that “his wor-
ries and fears seemed to fall away and he was filled with a sense of deep trust
and oneness with the universe.”7 Dewey said to Eastman, as quoted by
Rockefeller, “Everything that’s here is here and you can just lie back on it.
. . . I’ve never had any doubts since then—nor any beliefs. To me faith means
not worrying. . . . I claim that I’ve got religion and that I got it that night in
Oil City.”8 However, Dewey misrepresents his own views; as we shall see
soon, faith means more than not worrying. Dewey called the experience a
“mystic experience” because it was purely emotional and to some degree in-
effable.
It is now obvious why Dewey held that religious experiences are more
common than we think. They are more common because when persons who
have not internalized the beliefs and concepts of a particular religion or are
6. Ibid., 11.
7. Steven Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 67.
8. Ibid., 68.

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not committed to belief in a supernatural being have such a transformative

experience, and they do have them, they do not label the experience reli-
gious. Instead they may say, “I found the meaning of my life,” or, as Dewey
himself said, “I ceased to worry.” This leaves me to wonder why Dewey in-
sists on the word “religious.”
Let us return to the characteristic mark of a religious experience in Dewey’s

sense, the fact that it is followed by inner peace, by the ability to survive even
tragedy without sinking into depression. What happens in the experience?
One comes to see the things one values most forming a unified whole; one
ceases to feel oneself torn this way and that by this or that ideal. Or, again,
one sees the world as in some sense ordered rather than torn apart by the
conflicting aims of different nations, classes, or religions. Although this “see-
ing” is an act of the imagination, it is not, Dewey points out, fanciful. On
the contrary, the unifying and unified ideal has real effects in real life and
prompts choices and actions that will transform an unsatisfactory—that is,
a nonideal situation—into one that is more satisfactory, closer to a realiza-
tion of the ideal.
One’s ideals control one’s conduct, and in so far as they are moral ideals,
one can be said to have moral faith. However, warns Dewey, “What has been
said does not imply that all moral faith in ideal ends is by that fact religious
in quality. The religious is ‘morality touched by emotion’ only when the ends
of moral conviction arouse emotions that are not only intense but are actu-
ated and supported by ends that are so inclusive that they unify the self.”9
Immediately thereafter, Dewey explains, “The religious attitude signifies
something that is bound through imagination to a general attitude. This
comprehensive attitude, moreover, is much broader than anything indicated
by ‘moral’ in its usual sense. The quality of attitude is displayed in art, sci-
ence, and good citizenship.”10 Dewey has moved, I believe, beyond a natu-
ralistic reading of so-called religious experiences to a naturalistic characteri-
9. Dewey, A Common Faith, in Later Works 9:16.

10. Ibid., 17.

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zation of the religious life or the religious individual. In ordinary English a

religious is a monk or nun, a person whose life is directed by a very specific
and comprehensive ideal in all, even in its most minute aspects. Generally,
Dewey says, if your conduct is guided in every aspect of your life by a unified
moral ideal, then your attitude toward that ideal, the emotional tone that
permeates your life, is like that of a monk or nun toward God; it is thus
appropriate to call it a religious faith.
There are, I think, two ways of reading Dewey’s account of the meaning,
or at any rate his meaning, of the word “religious.” He may be saying that
some scientists, some artists, some good citizens are so single-mindedly de-
voted to their research, their artistic endeavors, their social/political activities
that one can say—in fact, we do say—science, or composing, or fighting for
the rights of the mentally limited is their religion, or that they do what they
do religiously. But surely this is too trivial; Dewey offers more than an anal-
ysis of a secondary use of the word “religious.” Moreover, I would want to
question whether mere single-mindedness is a good thing; morally repulsive
ideals can be and have been pursued single-mindedly. Yet clearly, “religious”
is for Dewey a term of commendation.
It seems more plausible to read Dewey as follows. It is impossible, he be-

lieves, for an intellectually honest educated person in the twentieth or
twenty-first century to accept any of the historic religions literally. Funda
mentalist creeds contradict science outright; liberal versions of these reli-
gions, abandoning piecemeal particular items in their historic creeds as these
conflict with scientific discoveries, find themselves on a slippery slope that
can only lead to total rejection of the creed. But that does not mean that
what is valuable in a religion—namely, that it gives meaning and unity to
life—must be given up.
This raises the following question. When you remove from any of the
historic religions all the factual claims, anything that might conflict with
what science in the broad sense discloses, what is left? In the best case, what
is left is moral guidance. Here one expects an account of what might be left.
Thus others say such things as Buddhism teaches compassion, Christianity
teaches humility, etc. Dewey is oddly parochial on this point, claiming that

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the historic religions other than Christianity and Judaism fail to provide
moral guidance because they fail to ascribe moral qualities to the deity. This
strikes me as doubly misguided. On the one hand, other faiths ascribe moral
qualities to the deity or to the founder of the faith. On the other hand, imi-
tatio dei is not the only way in which theistic religions provide moral guid-
ance. Moreover, Dewey objects to Judaism and Christianity precisely be-
cause, so he claims, they ascribe religious value to certain moral qualities
because they are embodied in the deity. In contrast, Dewey holds that certain
moral qualities have religious value because they are all-encompassing. Once
again Dewey has emphasized the difference between a religion and the reli-
gious quality of experience but not, so it seems to me, elaborated his concep-
tion of religious value.
Dewey makes his point again, but ultimately confusingly, in terms of the
meaning of the word “God.” For Christians—let us confine ourselves to them
because basically the many forms of Christianity, particularly of Protestantism,
are what Dewey has in mind—for Christians the word “God” refers to “a
Being having prior and therefore non-ideal existence.”11 For Dewey the word
stands for “the unity of all ideal ends arousing us to desire and action.” Or “the
ideal ends that at a given time and place one acknowledges as having authority
over one’s volitions and emotions, the values to which one is supremely de-
voted, as far as these ends, through imagination, take on unity.”12 God, so
understood, is not a Being and has no independent existence. According to
Dewey, “Here as far as I can see is the ultimate issue as to the difference be-
tween a religion and the religious as a function of experience.”13
What then are the ideal ends whose authority over us Dewey takes to be so
obvious that he need not argue for them? Here and there Dewey offers lists,
such as, “justice, affection, and that intellectual correspondence of our ideas
with realities that we call truth” or “justice, knowledge, beauty.”14 But such
11. Ibid., 29.

12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 30, 33.

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lists are always incomplete, at once too abstract and too specific. What we
really need to know is where our ideals come from, since a Deweyan God
cannot be understood as a preexisting source. The answer is that we begin
with goods actually enjoyed, “the goods of human association, arts, and
knowledge. The idealizing imagination seizes upon the most precious things
found in the climacteric moments of experience and projects them. We need
no external criterion and guarantee for their goodness. They are had, they
exist as good, and out of them we frame our ideal ends.”15
We begin with experience, with experiences that are experienced as
good. But while we need no external criterion of the goodness of these
consummatory experiences, we may learn that the price we pay to have or
to prolong some of these experiences is too high. We can only begin with
experiences as experienced, but we need not persist in our initial valuation
of them; indeed, we must be prepared to reevaluate them. We know that
Dewey insists on this modification when he writes in a different context—
that is, in the context of a theory of valuation. Here, in A Common Faith,
he is content to give a rough outline of his view. In any case, however good
some consummatory experiences may be, our situation as a whole is not
satisfactory, not ideal. So we use our imagination to develop visions of a
better world, an ideal world, but one that is related to the present world.
Dewey speaks of a rearrangement of existing conditions. We do not fash-
ion our ideals de novo. As is the case with knowledge, so it is with valua-
tion. We stand on the shoulders of past generations, we modify in light of
new experiences, we pass on an improved vision. So, at least Dewey, the
inveterate optimist, would have said.
In his reply to his critics in the volume devoted to him in the Library of
Living Philosophers, Dewey tells us that he wrote A Common Faith in order
to make “explicit the religious values implicit in the spirit of science as un-
dogmatic reverence for truth in whatever form it presents itself, and the re-
ligious values implicit in our common life, especially in the moral signifi-
15. Ibid.

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cance of democracy as a way of living together.”16 Why does Dewey speak of

religious values, and why is it important to make them explicit?
Let us proceed in a Deweyan spirit. What was the problematic or unsat-
isfactory situation that prompted Dewey’s reflections on religion? A Common
Faith begins, “Never before in history has mankind been so much of two
minds.” There are those who, with Dewey, hold that the scientific method
broadly conceived—also called the method of intelligence—is the only
method leading to true belief because it is ever open to self-correction. On
the other side there are those who recognize revelation, as transmitted in
sacred scriptures, to be an alternative source of truth. No one holds that
revelation is the only source of truth, but when revelation conflicts with
what science claims to disclose, these people hold that science must give way.
In fact, the situation was, and continues to be, more complicated. Liberal
members of faith communities tend to give up specific propositions of their
creeds when these conflict with science, but they hold on to a basic belief in
a supernatural deity. Thus, not only is humanity as a whole divided, but
many individuals are divided within themselves. Moreover, Dewey pointed
out, religions (again he thinks particularly of various variants of Christianity)
tend to support moral and political values that are remnants retained from
earlier ages. Opposition to birth control or to same-sex marriage may serve
as contemporary examples. Once again liberal members of these faith com-
munities experience an inner conflict: their consciences are shocked by some
of the alleged moral judgments of the supernatural deity.
Here one is tempted to wonder why these liberal religionists, as Dewey
calls them, do not go all the way and give up the belief in the supernatural?
Why do they not recognize that the stories told in their scriptures are myths
to be interpreted as metaphors? Why do they not frankly admit that the
morality ascribed to the deity is outdated? Let us approach a response to this
question obliquely.
In The Quest for Certainty Dewey reminds us, “There are, again, moments
of intense emotional appreciation when, through a happy conjunction of
the state of the self and of the surrounding world, the beauty and harmony
of existence is disclosed in experiences which are the immediate consumma-
16. Dewey, “Experience, Knowledge and Value: A Rejoinder,” in The Philosophy of

John Dewey, ed. P. A. Schilpp (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1939), 517–608.
Reprinted in The Later Works, 14:8–91, 79.

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tion of all for which we long.” Of such experiences Dewey says that they set
“the measure of our ideas of possibilities that are to be realized by intelligent
endeavor”—that is, by “actions that are directed by thought, such as are
manifested in the works of fine art and in all human relations perfected by
loving care.”17
I quote this for two reasons. On the one hand to remind you once more
of the crucial role played by consummatory experiences in Dewey’s own
world view. On the other hand because a few paragraphs later Dewey,
having once again objected to the intellectual content of religions that
comes into conflict with science, characterizes “the religious attitude as a
sense of the possibilities of existence and as devotion to the cause of these
possibilities.”18
Science together with imagination discloses the possibilities of existence;
the religious attitude is devotion to the cause of realizing certain of these
possibilities. Why then should there be a conflict between science and reli-
gion? In the last chapter of The Quest for Certainty, Dewey gives an answer
that is more interesting, more thorough than reference to particular propo-
sitions of some religious creed that contradict relevant propositions of sci-
ence. Rather what the liberal religionist will not give up is the philosophical
dogma that “the reality and power of whatever is excellent and worthy of
supreme devotion depends upon proof of its antecedent existence, so that
the ideal of perfection loses its claim on us unless it can be demonstrated to
exist in the sense in which the sun and stars exist.”19
This is Dewey’s answer to my question a few paragraphs ago, asking why
do liberal Christians, liberal Jews, liberal religionists in general not give up
the belief in a divine Being, in Higher Powers, in short, in something super-
natural. The answer, Dewey claims, is that these liberals believe, wrongly
according to Dewey, that they themselves would cease to love justice and
mercy if they did not walk humbly with their God, to use the words of the
prophet Micah.
As the Oxford Dictionary definition makes clear, religious belief is belief
in “higher powers.” I am not convinced that such a belief involves a belief in
the antecedent existence of our highest ideals “as the sun and stars exist.”

18. Ibid., 242.
19. Ibid.

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William James pointed out that an egg is a possible chicken; it is not a

chicken already existing in some other realm. Out of an actual egg an actual
chicken may emerge if certain further conditions obtain. Our highest ideals
may be realized if we devote ourselves to their realization; their realization
becomes more likely if others join our efforts, and, a religious person may
add, their realization becomes even more likely if God (the Higher Power)
cooperates with us. William James developed such a conception of God in
the last chapter of Pragmatism, writing that “monotheism itself, so far as it
was religious and not a scheme of class-room instruction for the metaphysi-
cians, has always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter pares, in the
midst of all the shapers of the great world’s fate.”20
No doubt, Dewey spoke from experience of some Christians he had
known when he thought that belief in a supernatural deity might encourage
inaction. However, we can likewise speak from experience of the devotion
with which members of traditional faith communities have devoted their
efforts to realize possibilities dear to Dewey’s heart. I am thinking of men
like Dr. Martin Luther King, women like Mother Teresa, or the activities of
South and Central American liberation theologians. Nothing follows from
these examples. I am, however, inclined to think that the supernaturalism
Dewey opposed so passionately was a belief in an omniscient and omnipo-
tent God. In contrast, the deity in which we not only have a right to believe
but are better off believing, according to William James, is, as already men-
tioned, in some sense finite. I see no reason why “liberal religionists” need to
give up belief in such a God.
I have digressed. Dewey claims that there would be no conflict between
science and religion if the metaphysical assumption that our highest ideals
must exist antecedently were given up. This means, he writes, not only “that
a religious attitude would surrender once for all commitment to beliefs
about matters of fact whether physical, social or metaphysical. . . . Nor
would it substitute in their place fixed belief about values, save the one value
of discovering the possibilities of the actual and striving to realize them.”21
Dewey’s last comment strikes me as more revealing of his deeper concerns
than the attacks on supernaturalism as a source of factual, though false, be-


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liefs. Note, by the way, that an understanding of values as evolving as we try

to realize them is compatible with a Jamesean finite deity as well as with a
Deweyan metaphorical God.
What then were Dewey’s positive views? Dewey begins his essay “What I
Believe” by distinguishing two senses of the word “faith.” In the older sense
it refers to a body of propositions believed on the words of an authority, ul-
timately on the basis of revelation. It is a belief that such and such is the case.
In the newer sense faith is a commitment to act. “Faith in the newer sense,”
Dewey holds, “signifies that experience is the sole ultimate authority.”22 Of
course, Dewey’s faith in experience comes as no surprise. Is this not just to
say again that science broadly conceived is the only intellectual authority?
No. In the context of referring to a willingness to act, to say that experience
is the only authority is to reject the authority of revelation, or more generally
of the religions, as source of our ultimate values. Because moral codes or
conceptions of the good based on revelation or sacred literature are back-
ward looking, they insist on behavior suitable for an age when humans con-
fronted nature helplessly. Such codes may require behavior that has become
positively harmful; more often, they are silent on the questions that new
technologies and new social and economic conditions bring to the fore.
To say that experience is the ultimate authority is to say that we are free
to adjust to new circumstances, that we are able to develop new conceptions
of an attainable better future. Such new conceptions will then motivate us to
aid in bringing that future about. For Dewey, the revolution in methods of
gaining knowledge, that is, the triumph of the scientific method, is far more
important than any particular knowledge we have gained in the sciences
from anthropology to zoology. The natural sciences have taught us that ev-
erything existing undergoes change. But, Dewey notes with chagrin, most
people (he thinks particularly of Christians in the United States) think that
in religion, morals, politics, and economics everything is fixed: Christianity
is the final religion; capitalism is the final economic system (though it may
need some minor adjustments); and the institution of marriage and the fam-
ily will endure in its present (i.e., twentieth-century shape). Seventy-five
years later we have barely begun to challenge that litany. But a philosophy of
experience, Dewey believes, will accept the reality of change even in social,

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moral, and religious matters and will attempt to direct these changes. “It is
not called upon to cherish utopian notions about the imminence of such
intelligent direction of social changes. But it is committed to faith in the
possibility of its slow effectuation in the degree in which men realize the full
import of the revolution that has already been effected in physical and tech-
nical regions.”23
Another popular error Dewey opposes is the idea that there must be one
purpose to everything that happens, one grand meaning. People seek such
meaning in the historic religions, or failing to find such meaning, they sink
into despair. Dewey, the eternal optimist, says that there are many meanings,
interconnected. And then he wrote, “Search for a single, inclusive good is
doomed to failure. Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full
participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing
situation of experience its own full and unique meaning. Faith in the varied
possibilities of diversified experience is attended with the joy of constant
discovery and of constant growing. Such a joy is possible even in the midst
of trouble and defeat, whenever life-experiences are treated as potential dis-
closures of meanings and values that are to be used as means to a fuller and
more significant future experience.”24 What Dewey here described is, I take
it, what he meant by the religious quality of some experiences.
In conclusion, I want to return to one declaration of Dewey’s and to one
question I asked. The statement is this: “Whether or no we are, save in some
metaphorical sense, all brothers, we are at least all in the same boat traversing
the same turbulent ocean. The potential religious significance of this fact is
infinite.”25 Since the religious is, for Dewey, what is of ultimate and inclusive
moral significance, I conclude that Dewey’s faith, his faith in the sense of
what motivates him to act, is faith in democracy as a way of life, both social
and individual. On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, now seventy years
ago, Dewey characterized democracy in this sense as follows: “Democracy is
a personal way of individual life. . . . It signifies the possession and continual
use of certain attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire
and purpose in all the relations of life.”26 (This is not the place to elaborate
23. Ibid., 271.

24. Ibid., 272.

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Dewey’s all-encompassing notion of democracy; indeed, it is not a task to be

undertaken in one essay.)27 Dewey himself wrote about his conception of
democracy over and over again. Generally, we think of democracy as mean-
ing, ideally, that every adult human being contributes equally to the con-
struction of the good, where we mean, of course, every living human being.
But Dewey concludes A Common Faith by reminding us:
The things in civilization that we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by
grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in
which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting,
rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those
who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessi-
ble and more generously shared than we received it. Here are all the elements
of a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class or race. Such a faith
has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make
it explicit and militant.28
27. Nevertheless, I have made an attempt at this in Chapter 27 (“Democracy as a

Way of Life”) of this volume.

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21
Philosophy as a Reconstructive
Activity
William James on Moral Philosophy
Hilary Putnam
IN HIS “Introduction: Reconstruction as Seen Twenty-Five Years Later” to

the second edition of Reconstruction in Philosophy, John Dewey wrote,
Today Reconstruction of Philosophy is a more suitable title than Recon

struction in Philosophy. For the intervening events have sharply defined, have
brought to a head, the basic postulate of the text: namely that the distinctive
office, problems and subject matter of philosophy grow out of the stresses and
strains in the community life in which a given form of philosophy arises, and
that, accordingly, its specific problems vary with the changes in human life
that are always going on and that at times constitute a crisis and a turning
point in human history.1
Both Dewey and his philosophical ally William James shared the concep-
tion of philosophy as a reconstructive activity, an activity that aims at
making a difference to the way we understand and the way we live our
1. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy [orig. 1920; enlarged ed. 1948], in Middle

Works, 12:v–vi.

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332 PRAGMATIST CONCEPTIONS OF MORAL VALUE AND DEMOCRACY
scientific, aesthetic, educational, religious, and political lives, one compre-

hensive and durable enough to deserve the name of a “reconstruction.” But
by the time Dewey wrote the words I have just quoted, philosophy was
going in a very different direction or set of directions, which is why Dewey
writes that we need “reconstruction of philosophy” and not just recon-
struction in philosophy.
And he goes on to lament that contemporary philosophy—in the 1940s,
when those words were penned—is “concerned for the improvement of
techniques” and with “erudite scholarship about the past that throws no
light on the issues now troubling mankind” at the expense of “substantial
content,” and in a way that involves “a withdrawal from the present scene.”2
Today, however, a half century after Dewey’s “Reconstruction as Seen
Twenty-Five Years Later” was written, the willingness to consider that the
pragmatist tradition may say something worth listening to seems to be on
the rise (although, unfortunately, not always for the best of reasons).3 In the
present essay, I shall explore the way in which such a conception of philoso-
phy informs the thinking of one great pragmatist. My pragmatist of choice
today, however, will be not John Dewey but the ally I mentioned, William
James, whose reconstructive conception of philosophy is still less often noted
than is Dewey’s.
Before I turn to James, let me say one further word. I am troubled by the
way in which contemporary moral philosophy still seems to have what one
might call a “Queen of the Sciences” conception of philosophy (“sciences” in
the sense of “knowledges” or Wissenschaften, that is, not natural sciences).
When I read today’s distinguished moral philosophers, the conception of the
subject I often encounter is that the moral philosopher will provide a set of
principles—to be sure, very general and abstract ones—which hoi polloi are
then to apply. In a recent and brilliant study, Michelle Moody-Adams—who
acknowledges Dewey as a predecessor—has criticized both this conception
and the various recent attacks on the very idea of moral theory:
2. All quotes in this paragraph are from ibid., vi–vii.

3. For example, Rorty has tried hard to connect pragmatism with the rejection of
the notion of objective truth, as well as the rejection of any notions of justification that
are not purely “sociological,” while Richard Posner and Stanley Fish use “pragmatism”
as a label for a form of utilitarianism and for unapologetic opportunism, respectively.

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PHILOSOPHY AS A RECONSTRUCTIVE ACTIVITY 333
An effective challenge to . . . skepticism about the relevance of moral theory

to moral life must begin by relinquishing the vain insistence on the authori-
tative status of philosophical moral inquiry—along with the implausible no-
tion that moral philosophy produces moral expertise. There is a middle way
between the skeptical anti-theorist view on which moral philosophy should
be replaced by some other discipline—such as cultural anthropology, or exper-
imental psychology, or literature, or some combination thereof—and the un-
supportable view that moral philosophy is the final court of appeal on ques-
tions of moral justification. That middle way involves thinking of moral
philosophy as a valuable and distinctive participant in the ongoing process of
moral inquiry.4
As we shall see, what bothers Moody-Adams today also bothered Wil

liam James, and her idea that moral philosophy can be a “valuable and
distinctive participant” without claiming “authoritative status” is one
that James anticipated. But my aim is not simply to celebrate James
today (for some of his metaphysical assumptions were certainly prob-
lematic) but to see what were the insights and what were the problems
in the ways in which a great, if still neglected, philosopher thought
about the problem of “reconstruction in philosophy.” For the most part,
my discussion will be based on the essay in which James discusses the
status of moral philosophy at greatest length, and in which he connects
that status explicitly with his own pragmatist theory of truth—“The
Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”—and I shall read that essay in
the light of my own exegetical work on James’s theory of truth, as re-
vealed in the whole course of his writing.5
4. Michelle Moody-Adams, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and

Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 176. See the epilogue as
well.
Works, 6:141–162. The opening sentence of the essay (141)—“The main purpose of this
paper is to show that there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmat-
ically made up in advance. We all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy
so far as we contribute to the race’s moral life”—is the very point that Michelle Moody-
Adams makes in the passage I quoted. See Chapter 11 (“James’s Theory of Truth”) of
this volume.

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1. The “Casuistic Question”
James distinguishes three questions within the general field of moral phi-
losophy, which he calls respectively the psychological question, the meta-
physical question, and the casuistic question.6 By “the casuistic question”
James has in mind the task of working out a specific moral code. As we
shall see, he regards the task as a paradoxical one—and especially so for the
philosopher!
James begins by making the important point that the philosopher already
has a moral ideal of his own simply by virtue of being a philosopher—
namely, the moral ideal of a system. (It is not often remarked that the desire
for a moral system is itself a moral ideal, is it?) Next, James tells us that we
stand ourselves at present in the place of that philosopher, the philosopher
who has the ideal of a comprehensive system of ethics, a system of ethical
truths that we can discover if we take pains. But, he goes on, “We must not
fail to realize all the features that the situation comports. In the first place we
will not be skeptics. We [hold to it] that there is a truth to be ascertained.”
And he continues: “But in the second place we have just gained the insight
that that truth cannot be a self-proclaiming set of laws, or an abstract ‘moral
reason’, but can only exist in act or in the shape of an opinion held by some
thinker really to be found. There is, however, no visible thinker invested
with authority.”7
This is what makes the problem of moral philosophy, or, more specifi-
cally, “the casuistic question,” paradoxical in James’s view: on the one hand,
we are to seek what moral philosophers have always sought, a system of
moral truths, but we must do so without relying on the faith that there is an
abstract moral reason or a self-proclaiming set of moral laws. “Shall we then
simply proclaim our own ideals as the law-giving ones?” James asks. “No!
For if we are true philosophers, we must throw our own spontaneous ideals,
even the dearest, impartially in with that total mass of ideals which are fairly
to be judged.”8
That is, the task assigned to moral philosophers is to seek not an Archimedean
point, but a point of some impartiality. They must begin by looking at all the
6. James, “The Moral Philosopher,” in Works, 6:142.

7. Ibid., 151.
8. Ibid.

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ideals that human beings have, or at least at all the ideals that men and women
of good will have. We are to throw all our ideals, even the dearest, impartially
in with the total mass of ideals and then try to judge them impartially.
But how then can we as philosophers ever find a test? How avoid complete
moral skepticism on the one hand, and on the other escape bringing a way-
ward personal standard of our own along with us, on which we simply pin our
faith? The dilemma is a hard one, nor does it grow a bit more easy as we re-
volve it in our minds. The entire undertaking of the philosopher obliges him
to seek an impartial test. That test, however, must be incarnated in the de-
mands of some actually existent person. And how can he pick out the person,
save by an act in which his own sympathies and predilections are implied?9
That was James’s problem, and it is our problem today: to find a route to
objective ethical truths not in a Platonic realm of independently existing
values, nor yet in a faculty of pure practical reason, as in Kant, but starting
with the demands of actually existing persons—and to do this without sim-
ply pinning our faith on “a wayward personal standard of our own.”
2. The “Metaphysical Question”
Now let us turn to what James calls “the metaphysical question.” James
somewhat misleadingly—that is, misleadingly for us today—describes this
as the question of what we mean by the words “obligation,” “good,” and
“ill.” Speaking of this as the question of what we “mean” suggests conceptual
analysis, and that is not really what James means. What James means is
rather an inquiry into the nature of obligation, good, ill, and so on—a meta-
physical inquiry (which is very often what analytic philosophers also mean,
even when they claim to be only “analyzing concepts”).
First of all, James argues that there cannot be any good or bad in a uni-
verse without sentient life. Perhaps only G. E. Moore at his dottiest would
have disagreed with this. “The moment one sentient being, however, is made
a part of the universe, there’s a chance for goods and evils really to exist.”10
9. Ibid., 151–152.
10. Ibid., 145.

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However, James does not say merely, as would most philosophers, that
there would be no goods and evils in a world without sentient beings; he
maintains the metaphysical premise that obligations—all obligations, in-
cluding epistemic ones—and all standards, including epistemic ones, can
only arise from the demands of sentient beings. When something is “re-
quired of us,” it is literally required—“demanded” is James’s word for this—
by some sentient being or other, and it is, so to speak, the will of the other
that we experience as a demand upon us, and nothing more than this.
James makes a remarkable metaphysical move: “The moment one sen-
tient being, however, is made a part of the universe there is a chance for
goods and evils really to exist. Moral relations now have their status in that
being’s consciousness. So far as he feels anything to be good, he makes it
good.”11
If we stopped there, this would fit all the subjectivist and relativist read-
ings of James. If we ignored the context, we might really read this as mean-
ing, “If it satisfies him, it is good.” In a sense James says that—but he inflects
it in a very unexpected way. “It is good, for him; and being good for him is
absolutely good. For he is the sole creator of values in that universe. And
outside of his opinion, things have no moral character at all.”12
Again, if we stopped there, we would have as relativist or subjectivist a
doctrine as one can find. But now listen: “In such a universe as that, it would
of course be absurd to raise the question of whether the solitary thinker’s
judgments of good and ill are true or not. Truth supposes a standard outside
of the thinker to which he must conform. But here the thinker is a sort of
divinity subject to no higher judge. Let us call the supposed universe which
he inhabits a moral solitude.”13
This one sentence—“Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker to
which he must conform”—constitutes a one-line statement of what has of-
ten been taken to be “Wittgenstein’s private language argument.” I have ar-
gued elsewhere that Wittgenstein did not in fact have a “community stan-
dards” view of truth,14 but James did, provided you are willing to count as
11. Ibid., 145–146.

12. Ibid., 146.
13. Ibid.
14. Hilary Putnam, “On Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics,” Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, 70 (suppl.) (1996): 243–264.

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the community the whole of the human race up to what James calls “the last
man.” More precisely, what James had was an “ultimate consensus” view of
truth; while James’s philosophy has many facets, one important facet is his
insistence, early and late, that truth requires what he calls “ultimate consen-
sus,” that what is true is what becomes “coercive” over opinion in the long
run, what becomes “the whole drift of thought.”15 But in the passage I just
quoted, James is adding an important qualification: meaningful consensus
requires something more than convergence in the opinions of one person
(or, as we immediately see, even in the independently arrived at opinions of
persons who do not communicate). Meaningful consensus presupposes
community.
James makes this point explicitly by imagining a world in which there are
two sentient beings who are indifferent to one another. Of such a world he
says,
Not only is there no single point of view within it from which the values of
things can be unequivocally judged, there is not even the demand for such a
point of view, since the two thinkers are supposed to be indifferent to each
other’s thoughts and acts. Multiply the thinkers into a pluralism, and we find
real for us in the ethical sphere something like that world which the antique
skeptics conceived of, in which individual minds are the measures of all
things, and in which no one objective truth, but only a multitude of subjec-
tive opinions can be found. But this is a kind of world with which the philos-
opher, so long as he holds to the hope of a philosophy, will not put up. [I do
not know of any place where James more clearly rejects Rortyian relativism.]
Among the various ideals represented there must be, he thinks, some which
have the more truth or authority, and to these the others ought to yield so that
system and subordination may reign.16
At this point, James begins to develop his own moral views. I do not want
to go into the details of those views. What I want to point out is the import-
ant statement that truth presupposes a standard external to the thinker—a
standard, however, that is not transcendental. James is quite explicit on that.
In the same essay, he writes that even if there is a God, “still the theoretic
15. See Chapter 11 (“James’s Theory of Truth”) of this volume for the evidence for
this claim.
16. James, “The Moral Philosopher,” in Works, 6:146–147.

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question would remain, What is the ground of the obligation even here?”17
(Shades of Kant!) And that ground must be a real claim, one which is felt as
real. “The only force that appeals to us, which either a living God or an ab-
stract ideal order can wield, is found in the everlasting ruby vaults of our
own human hearts as they happen to beat responsively or not responsively to
the claim. So far as they do feel it, when made by a living consciousness it is
life answering to life.”18 What we want is an ethical standard external to the
subjective opinions of any one thinker, but not external to all thinkers or all
life.
Needless to say, the two metaphysical assumptions I have isolated are
deeply problematic ones. The idea that obligation can be reduced to demand
is not one that is likely to find adherents today—apart from the utilitarians,
who are, of course, still with us. James’s way of attempting the reduction
turns on the attractive idea that the problem in ethics is ultimately the rec-
onciliation of ideals.19 To the further question of what makes a reconciliation
objectively right, James’s answer would be just what makes the outcome of
any inquiry right, that the particular reconciliation, or the particular out-
come, becomes the “ultimate consensus.” This answer, however, presupposes
that truth can be identified with ultimate consensus, and that view also has
few adherents. (I myself have criticized it more than once, and I shall criti-
cize it again later in this essay.)20 James’s metaphysics of morals stands or falls
(unfortunately) with his metaphysics of truth.
Why then should we who do not think that truth can be defined as “ulti-
mate consensus” be interested in James’s moral philosophy? For at least two
reasons: first, even if truth is not the same thing as what the human commu-
nity will converge to in the long run, nevertheless James was right to see a
connection between the existence of community and the possibility of dis-
tinguishing between subjectivity and objectivity. The connection is not as
simple as James’s metaphysical account would have it, but, in fact, it is only
through the experiences we have of winning others over through argument,
17. Ibid., 148.

18. Ibid., 149.
19. This idea is developed in Section III of “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral
Life.”
20. See Chapter 2 (“Pragmatism and Verificationism”) of this volume; also Chapter
11 (“James’s Theory of Truth”).

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of being won over ourselves, of searching for consensus between individuals

with different temperaments, different funded knowledges, and different
ideologies, that we come to have and to appreciate such notions as good
reason. Perhaps the existence of community is not a “logical” prerequisite for
the existence of objective justification, but it is an existential and phenome-
nological prerequisite for the existence of the only forms of objective justifi-
cation we know. And, second, because James is right to remind us that if
objective resolutions to controversial questions require ongoing “experi-
ments” and a continual attempt to arrive at consensus, then there is some-
thing deeply wrong with the idea of “an ethical philosophy dogmatically
made up in advance.”21 I now turn to this second aspect of James’s thought.
3. Truth about Middle-Sized Dry Goods versus Truth in Ethics
We are in the position that all of us claim general validity for our moral
views, or whatever views, while at the same time we do not all agree. Let me
qualify that. On some things we do agree. In fact, though epistemologists
may disagree on what the standards are for saying that there are enough
chairs for us all to sit on, we do not really disagree about that very often. We
may disagree about what Roderick Chisholm wrote in a philosophy paper,
or what Quine writes in a philosophy paper, but these disagreements literally
play no role in our lives. Nobody checks whether Memorial Hall still exists
one bit differently because of all the thousands of pages that have been writ-
ten using that sort of example. Nobody checks whether there is a book on
this table one bit differently in spite of all the thousands and thousands of
pages, the thousands and thousands of books, that have been written on
how we know there is a book on the table. To be sure, a philosopher might
say, “It is not clear what is meant by pragmatist talk, James’s talk or Quine’s
talk, of the best trade-off between predictive power, preserving founded be-
liefs, and elegance, even in the case of ‘There’s a book on the table’”; but the
fact is that we are in agreement concerning the standards for that, at least
when direct perceptual verification is concerned. In the law court, when it is
a question of indirect verification, we may disagree. But ultimately the truth
21. James, “The Moral Philosopher,” in Works, 6:156–157.

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in such a case is determined by the possibility of direct verification, as James

says. And on direct verification we are in agreement—in agreement as shown
by our lives, not by our philosophical words.
As James tells us in the opening paragraphs of this essay, however, there
are certain kinds of matters, especially moral and political matters, that are
so problematic that we not only often disagree, but even if we were to come
to agreement, we might not be sure whether the agreement would last or was
a temporary phase in the evolution of society.22 We cannot really be sure in
these sorts of cases, James says, “until the last man has had his experience and
said his say,” which is to say we will never be sure in the case of these matters
beyond all possibility of changing our minds.
James, to be sure, recognizes that “abstract rules can indeed help” in such
moral and political matters, but he also cautions that “the ethical philoso-
pher must wait on facts” and, furthermore, that
he only knows if he makes a bad mistake, the cries of the wounded will soon
inform him of the fact. In all this the philosopher is just like the rest of us
non-philosophers, so far as we are just and sympathetic instinctively, and so
far as we are open to the voice of complaint. His function is in fact indistin-
guishable from that of the best kind of statesman at the present day. His books
on ethics, therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more and
more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative and sug-
gestive rather than dogmatic—I mean with novels and dramas of the deeper
sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and philanthropy and social and
economical reform. Treated in this way ethical treatises may be voluminous
and luminous as well; but they can never be final, except in their abstractest
and vaguest features, and they must more and more abandon old-fashioned,
clearcut, and would-be ‘scientific’ form.23
22. The first paragraph of “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” runs as fol-
lows: “The main purpose of this essay is to show that there is no such thing possible as
an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We all help to determine the
content of moral philosophy so far as we contribute to the race’s moral life. In other
words, there can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man
has had his experience and said his say. In the one case as in the other, however, the hy-
potheses we now make while waiting, and the acts to which they prompt us, are among
the indispensable conditions which determine what that ‘say’ shall be” (141).
23. Ibid., 158–159.

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I see James, in this passage, as revoking—rather than simply contradict-

ing—his earlier statement that “if we are true philosophers, we must throw
our own spontaneous ideals, even the dearest, impartially in with that total
mass of ideals which are fairly to be judged.” The writing in “The Moral
Philosopher and the Moral Life” is, as James’s writing always is, highly “lit-
erary.” James takes us along with him on a mental journey, a musing, in the
course of which a number of twists and turns take place. At the end of the
journey, we have to see that James is telling us that the moral philosopher
with which he started, the moral philosopher who has no ideal of her own
except the ideal of a “system” will come up empty-handed—or come up
with nothing but “the abstractest and vaguest features” of morality. The price
of ethical treatises that really treat the moral life is the willingness to take a
stand that does not pretend to the total impartiality that led to the seeming
paradox that moral philosophy is required to produce a whole moral world
practically ex nihilo. In this James is being true to his perpetual insistence on
the agent point of view as the only one ultimately available to us, as well as
to his pragmatic insistence that the standards by which inquiry is conducted
themselves emerge from the give and take, the conflict of ideals and points
of view, and cannot be laid down beforehand.
4. Some Problems with a Normative Consensus Theory of Truth
Let us now consider some criticisms that might be made of consensus views
of either truth or rationality. The consensus that Peirce and James had in
mind and that today’s consensus theorists also have in mind was an unforced
consensus, a consensus reached after experimentation and discussion. One
might ask, “Well, why should we identify truth with the outcome of open
and free discussion? Why not identify it with the will of the strongest? If
somebody has the power to impose his view forever, if some super-Hitler can
impose his view forever, that would show the super-Hitler is the strongest.
Why shouldn’t we say truth is just the will of the stronger?” This is the ques-
tion raised by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic.
One answer would be that a “truth” that is accepted only out of fear
of the tyrant is the “truth” of a moral solitude. “Truth supposes a stan-
dard outside the thinker to which he must conform,” and the tyrant
acknowledges no such standard. Just as in the universe with only a sin-

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gle thinker, “it would of course be absurd” to raise the question of

whether the tyrant’s judgments of good and ill are true or not, unless it
be from the point of view of the tyrant’s subjects (assuming they form a
community, and are not held together only by a common fear of the
tyrant). You cannot have a community, James thinks, if you are deaf to
“the cries of the wounded.” In addition, both Peirce and James argue
that any attempt to impose answers to our questions, no matter of what
sort, by sheer authority—including the authority of allegedly a priori
truths—will fail in the long run.24
What Peirce argued, and what James is building on in Peirce’s thought,
is the claim that we will not, in fact, arrive at beliefs that can withstand
criticism, that can withstand refutation, if we “block the paths of inqui-
ry.”25 As a matter of human experience, the “Method of Authority” and the
“Method of What Is Agreeable to Reason” have met failure. They have not
led to consensus. They have led to disagreements and to much less prag-
matic success than we have had in the three hundred years since Bacon.26
The pragmatist line is to argue that, even if the notions James employs in
Pragmatism of true ideas “carry[ing] us prosperously from any one part of
our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working se-
curely” are vague, they are not empty: we know from experience that we
do not do as well when we block the paths of inquiry.27 The pragmatist
refusal to tell us once and for all exactly how to conduct scientific inquiry
or exactly how to conduct moral inquiry is not accidental; it is intrinsic to
the view that standards of inquiry should be expected to change in the
course of inquiry itself.
24. That there is a strong Peircean strain in James’s views on truth is argued in
Chapter 11 (“James’s Theory of Truth”).
25. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief ” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Collected
Papers, 5:358–387, 388–410.
26. Although Peirce also argues that the “Method of Tenacity”—which is common
to both the appeal to Authority and the appeal to What Is Agreeable to Reason—
makes “true” little more than an emotive word for beliefs one likes, and this could,
perhaps, be regarded as a “conceptual” argument.

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5. Is James’s Insistence on the Agent Point of View Compatible

with His Consensus Theory of Truth?
Sometimes philosophers who are a little surprised that I “work on” James have
asked me what I have learned from James. Of course, I feel that my debts to
James are too long to list in a paragraph. But when I am asked the question, I
think more or less immediately of two things: first, the idea that we must not
be afraid of offering our own philosophic picture, even though we know that
our picture is fallible (and based on “our own ideals”), and that it always needs
to be discussed with and by others seems to me much needed at a time when
the image of philosophy as a sort of final authority still dominates so much
moral philosophy. It is this aspect of James that I have been stressing in this
essay. And second—but not in importance—I have been impressed and
strongly influenced by the stress in James on the agent point of view.28
That stress is complementary to the insights I have been talking about, the
Peircean insights in James. James always has a “we” in mind, his theory of truth
is a theory of truth for “us”; various forms of the first-person plural pronoun
occur again and again in James. But in James, the emphasis on the “we” is al-
ways balanced by an emphasis on the “I.” James simultaneously connects truth
with the ideal of rational consensus and insists on our right, indeed our re-
sponsibility, to take a stand, an individual stand. Not surprisingly, that too is
justified by a pragmatic argument. We will not do as well as we could do in
morality unless we are willing to take a stand in advance of the evidence, to
commit ourselves to ideas that we cannot yet intersubjectively validate.29
Of course, James is not the first or the last philosopher to have such an
idea. Some years ago I discovered a very interesting paper in which Albrecht
Wellmer argues that the emphasis on the agent point of view is actually in-
compatible with the Habermasian (and Jamesian) idea of ultimate consen-
sus as a necessary and sufficient condition for truth.30
28. See, in particular, the closing pages of my The Many Faces of Realism (LaSalle,
IL: Open Court, 1987).
29. See, especially, James, “The Will to Believe” and “The Sentiment of Rationality,”
in The Will to Believe, in Works, vol.6..
30. Albrecht Wellmer, “Intersubjectivity and Reason,” in Perspectives on Human
Conduct, ed. L. Herzburg and J. Pietanen (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 128–163.

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In this paper, Wellmer begins by discussing the notion of rationality, then

criticizes Richard Rorty’s sharp distinction between “rational argument,” op-
erating within a system, and irrational or arational “invention.” The point I
just referred to occurs when Wellmer discusses rational consensus as a crite-
rion of truth. He writes,
What I’ve said comes close to some of the considerations which Habermas has
put forward in support of a consensus theory of truth. Truth, according to
this theory, is the content of a rational consensus; and a consensus can be
called ‘rational’ if it has been achieved under conditions of an ideal speech
situation. As I have already indicated above, however, I do not believe that a
consensus theory of truth and the peculiar account of discursive rationality
which goes with it can be justified. Truth, as I’ve argued elsewhere, cannot be
defined in terms of a rational consensus, even if truth in some sense implies
the possibility of a rational consensus.31 For to put it in a nutshell: although
truth is public, the recognition of truth is always my recognition: i.e. each of
us must be convinced by arguments if a consensus is to be called rational. But
then the consensus cannot be what convinces us of the validity of a truth
claim.32
Certainly, we cannot decide if something is true by asking what other

people think—by taking votes, taking a poll, and counting the votes. Thus,
Wellmer asserts, “Although truth is public, it is not decided on publicly: I
myself have to decide in each single case whether I ought to take an argu-
ment seriously or not, whether an objection is serious or irrelevant, or
whether a truth claim has been justified. In short: it is always ‘I myself ’ who
has to evaluate what the others say—their truth claims, arguments and ob-
jections; and as far as these evaluations are fallible, they cannot become in-
fallible by becoming collective.”33
In one sense, of course, this last remark is too strong (especially the “in
each single case”). In practice, once I have decided that certain people are
rational, I do accept their consensus for truth on many matters—on what I
read in an atlas, on what my doctor tells me, on most scientific matters, etc.
31. Wellmer is probably referring to his Ethik und Dialog (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1986), 69–102.
32. Wellmer, “Intersubjectivity and Reason,” 157.
33. Ibid., 157–158.

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But if I myself am one of the sources of the relevant information, one of the
people whose task it is to inquire into the matter, then Wellmer is right.
Wellmer is saying that if one is inquiring into whether something is true
(e.g., whether there is life in another galaxy), one cannot conduct the inquiry
by looking to see if other people are converging on the view that there is life in
the other galaxy; one has to look at the other galaxy, at the astronomical, bio-
logical, etc., evidence, and make up one’s own mind. At first blush the argu-
ment may seem unfair; after all, Habermas, just as much as Peirce and James,
thinks of truth as what we converge on if we use the right method—the scien-
tific method in the ordinary “narrow” sense of “scientific method,” in the case
of the question “Is there life in the other galaxy?”—not as what we converge
on if we use the Method of What Is Agreeable to Reason, for example. But
Wellmer’s point is deeper than it looks. For, even if we all use the scientific
method, still, as scientists, we do not decide if there is life in the other galaxy
by seeing if other scientists are converging on the view that there is; even in an
ideally scientific community—especially in an ideally scientific community—
each scientist has to make up his or her own mind. But if “It is true that there
is life in the other galaxy” means that other people, using the right method,
will converge on the view that there is, then it would be perfectly appropriate
to look at other people to determine the truth of the sentence.
But is this argument effective against James? Although, in The Meaning of
Truth, absolute truth is characterized by James as membership in an “ideal set”
of “formulations” on which there will be “ultimate consensus”—a very Peircean
formulation—James never claims that “ultimate consensus” is what “true”
means.34 Metaphysics, in James’s view, consists of hypotheses; metaphysical
truths are not analytic. On the other hand, even if we take truth to be only
contingently identical with “ultimate consensus, provided inquiry is con-
ducted in the right way,” it may seem that the problem Wellmer raises does not
wholly go away. For if I ever come to believe, to accept, this “theory of truth,”
why should I then not determine if there is life in the other galaxy by investi-
gating the conclusions the others are coming to, rather than by investigating
that galaxy? But this is a question to which James has an answer.
The answer is that whether an inquiry is conducted in the right way—
which, for James, means with attention to concrete fact, and particularly

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when the inquiry is a moral one, with attention to “the cries of the
wounded,” fallibilistically, etc.—is itself a question that cannot be an-
swered from a nonengaged point of view. “I myself ” have to say whether
the inquiry is properly conducted or not, and I cannot do this without
participating in the inquiry myself. (This would also be Habermas’s answer
to Wellmer.)35
While this may meet Wellmer’s objection, there remain serious objec-
tions to the theory that being true is the same thing as being part of the
“ultimate consensus,” not the least being the possibility that there will be
no ultimate consensus, not even on the question whether there ever was a
conference on “Philosophy, Education and Culture” in Edinburgh. (And
Peirce’s counterfactual version of the ultimate consensus theory is even
more problematic.)
We should not, then, accept the Peirce-James view—that truth is to be
identified with the tremendously utopian idea of “the ultimate consensus”—
of the theory to be reached (and to become coercive) at the end of indefi-
nitely continued investigation. Nevertheless, a great deal that James wants to
deny should be denied. James is right to tell us that we do not have to think
of truth as presupposing a single (and therefore mysterious) “relation of
agreement with reality,” one and the same relation in all cases, or as presup-
posing some mysterious Absolute—an infinite mind able to overcome the
limitations of all limited and finite points of view (as in absolute idealism)—
or some other piece of transcendental machinery beneath our practice of
making and criticizing truth claims that makes that practice possible. In so
far as a general account of truth is possible at all, it seems to me that it was
given by Frege: to call any content (any Fregean “thought”) true is to make
the very same claim that one makes by asserting that content. (But substitute
“sentence” for “content” (Gedanke) in that formula, as today’s “disquotation-
alists” do, and one loses the entire point Frege was trying to make!) Frege’s
point was not that “true” is just a word that we attach to marks and noises
that we assert but that what connects descriptive judgments to the world is
35. See, for example, Jurgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1984) 1:113–114. Habermas is discussing the stance that an ideal social
scientist must take, but, in his view, this is just the stance that anyone interested in
understanding for its own sake must take.

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the content of those judgments; a descriptive judgment is intrinsically about

some part or aspect of the world—that is what makes it the judgment it is.36
To think of a judgment as a mere representation that has to be put into
“correspondence” with the world is a disastrous error. But Frege’s point also
applies to judgments that are not descriptions—to mathematical judgments,
normative judgements, etc.; to give an account of “truth in mathematics,” or
“truth in ethics,” etc., what is required is to give an account of the content of
mathematical, ethical, etc., judgments; or, as Wittgenstein would have put
it—eliminating any lingering metaphysical moments in Frege’s thought—of
what we do when we make mathematical, ethical, etc., claims—but without
succumbing to the temptation to think that an account of “what we do”
must be a reductive account.37
In short, we must not think that rejecting metaphysical accounts of truth
is the same as rejecting the notion of truth (or treating it as a mere “adjective
of commendation”). On the contrary, giving up the idea that there must be
a single metaphysical account that (simultaneously) accounts for the use of
“true” in ethics as well as in particle physics, in connection with the tables
and chairs as well as in connection with works of art, in religion as well as in
cooking, can and should free us to see that we need no better ground for
treating moral assertions as capable of truth and falsity than the fact that we
can and do rationally discuss them, that we can and do treat them as capable
36. “Marks and noises” is Rorty’s expression for our assertions, but all “disquota-
tionalists” from Ayer and Carnap on have supposed that “true” is a predicate of such
syntactic objects. Tarski’s view, to which they often appeal, is more nuanced: on the
one hand, he agrees with them in viewing sentences as syntactic objects, characteriz-
able apart from their meaning—which is a mistake; on the other hand, he presupposes
that the terms in our sentences have what he calls “concrete meanings,” and he does
not attempt to reduce our grasp of these meanings to the mastery of assertibility con-
ditions, as today’s disquotationalists all do. For a detailed discussion of the difference
between Frege’s view and the disquotationalist views with which it is so often con-
fused, see my “Sense, Nonsense and the Senses—An Inquiry into the Powers of the
Human Mind” (Dewey Lectures, 1994), The Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 9 (September
1994): Lecture III.
37. I discuss the error in reductionist readings of Wittgenstein in my Pragmatism:
An Open Question (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), as well as in the paper cited in the previ-
ous note.

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of warranted assertibility and warranted deniability. But to unpack that re-

mark I would have to turn to the writing of yet another pragmatist—John
Dewey.38
Note
As so often in the past, once again I owe a debt of gratitude to Ruth Anna
Putnam for her criticism of an earlier draft and for her valuable suggestions.
38. In these closing sentences I have borrowed from the close of my “Are Moral and
Legal Values Made or Discovered?” Legal Theory 1, no. 1 (March 1995): 19.

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22
The Moral Impulse
Ruth Anna Putnam
EARLY AND LATE in his philosophical life, William James was concerned to
articulate criteria of acceptability for philosophical, in particular metaphysi-
cal, positions. The point he made, as a young man and again as an old one,
was that we choose our philosophical visions—his terminology in A
Pluralistic Universe—on passional grounds. We demand that our image of
the world be hospitable to our most urgent interests, and James proposed
pragmatism as a philosophy that would satisfy this demand.1 For many phi-
losophers, but by no means for all, this means that an adequate philosophi-
cal view must allow room for our moral lives. Kant springs immediately to
mind as a philosopher whose life work was dominated by this quest. Of
course, I do not intend to suggest that philosophers whose philosophical
views do not make sense of their moral lives are immoral. I have known such
philosophers; they have been among the most morally admirable human
beings I have ever known. I want to suggest merely that such philosophers
lead a double life. In everyday life, I contend, all of us act as if we believed
that there are other people who share our world, that there are objective
moral values, that while much of our behavior is habitual, virtually all our
1. James, A Pluralistic Universe, in Works, vol. 4. James claimed that pragmatism

answered our passional demand more satisfactorily than other philosophies popular at
the time in the first of a series of lectures delivered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in
the winter of 1906–1907 and published as Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways
of Thinking in 1907 (Works, vol. 1).

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actions are potentially subject to deliberate choice, and that what we do

makes a difference in the world. Therefore, philosophers who reject one or
more of these beliefs as either false or senseless lead one life in their studies
and another outside. Alternatively, one might say that such philosophers are
profoundly inconsistent, that the beliefs that would make sense of their con-
duct contradict some of their philosophical doctrines.
The moral impulse of my title is the passionate desire to find a philosophy
that makes room for our moral lives, that would enable us to lead one life,
to be as consistent as is humanly possible in all our beliefs. It is, I think,
beyond controversy that both James and John Dewey developed their philos-
ophies in response to this impulse.2 That makes their philosophies not
merely attractive to me but leads me to think that pragmatism is important,
could play an important role, in the life of this nation and the world. Even
if neither James nor Dewey succeeded fully in their attempts, they seem to
have pointed us in a fruitful direction, as did the other (other than William
James) founder of pragmatism, C. S. Peirce.3 To say that one has developed
one’s philosophical position in response to the moral impulse, or in response
to any other passionate concern, is not to say that one does not have or has
not given intellectually compelling reasons for that position. It is a further
and separate point of James’s, discussed later, that when we lack such rea-
sons, we are nevertheless sometimes entitled to choose a belief on passional
grounds.4
Of course, I am not wedded to the word “pragmatism.” Lately I have
come to have considerable sympathy for C. S. Peirce’s complaint that the
word has come to mean too many different things to too many people; to-
2. It would be inappropriate here to cite Dewey’s numerous writings in which the

moral impulse of my title is clearly displayed. Some works will be cited later.
3. Although he published numerous articles, Peirce did not publish any books
during his lifetime. Many of his writings were published in Collected Papers.
4. Susan Haack drew my attention to this important distinction. As an illustration
from outside philosophy, medical research is sometimes prompted by a passionate
desire to find a cure for a particular illness; yet if a cure is found, its curative power will
have been established by intellectually compelling methods. On the other hand, what
keeps an investigator going through months and years of patient research is a belief, a
fortiori, not based on evidence, but chosen on passional grounds.

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T H E MOR A L I MPU L SE 351
day it is even less clear than it was at the end of the nineteenth century.5 Nor
do I think that, in the limited space at my disposal, I could do justice to the
enormously complex ways in which James and Dewey seek to make sense of
our moral lives (their ways are not identical). Rather I shall mention certain
beliefs that are required if one is to make sense of one’s moral life. And I shall
gesture at the forms these beliefs and their defense took for James and
Dewey. There will emerge a profound difference between them, but it may
well be that to other scholars that difference will appear to be superficial. If
so, the term “pragmatism” will prove to be less multivocal than it seems to
me at present.
The core experiences of our moral lives are these: there are times when life
does not proceed smoothly along habitual grooves, yet we do not permit an
impulse simply to throw us off course; instead, we deliberate. Again, there
are times when we look at what we have wrought and sometimes are glad
and sometimes regret that we chose this path rather than another. It seems
to me, but nothing hangs on my being right about this, that moral reflection
tends to be prompted by failures more often than by successes. In any case,
as James pointed out, regret does not make sense unless the world could have
been otherwise, and remorse—a special kind of regret—does not make any
sense unless one could have chosen to cause the world to be otherwise.6 But
do we have free will? How is one to deal with this question? Here James and
Dewey diverge. For James, the determinism or indeterminism alternative is
what he called a genuine option—that is, both alternatives attract us (they
are “live” for us, he would say). Nevertheless, we must choose one or the
other (we cannot suspend belief ), and accepting one of the alternatives or
the other will have serious consequences in our lives. Only if one believes in
indeterminism, James thought, will one be willing to act morally even at
great cost to oneself. Yet James also believed that the question of whether we
5. C. S. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” in Collected Papers, 5:411–437. In paragraph

414, he writes, “But at present, the word begins to be met with occasionally in the
literary journals, where it gets abused in the merciless way that words have to expect
when they fall into literary clutches.” Henceforth, Peirce continues, he will use the
term “pragmaticism” for his view, a term “which is ugly enough to be safe from kid-
nappers.”
6. James, “The Dilemma of Determinism,” in The Will to Believe, in Works, vol. 6.
The essay first appeared in 1884.

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have free will is one that cannot be settled on intellectual grounds.

Consequently, it is the sort of question that one is entitled to answer on
passional grounds; James asserts that he has free will.7 In contrast, Dewey
holds that the question of whether we have free will arises out of a radically
false world view—a dualism that regards the moral agent as separate and
different from the natural world and takes the world to be deterministic.
Dewey takes it that the free will issue disappears once that radically false
world view is rejected.
Lest I be misunderstood, I want to state quite clearly that James also re-
jected that dualistic view in all its ramifications. Nevertheless, James took
the metaphysical question seriously, while Dewey replaced it by concrete
questions concerning the amount of actual freedom, or open alternatives,
that the social or political environs of a given agent permit in a world that,
as quantum physics teaches, is not deterministic.8 Neither James nor Dewey
understand a morally significant act to be a gratuitous act; both understand
that morally significant choices express who we are and shape who we will
be, though neither encourages undue preoccupation with the state of one’s
soul. But this relation between character and conduct leaves room for choice,
for moral growth or deterioration, even for dramatic reversals.
As already mentioned, James argued that he could not understand the
willingness to act morally, at great cost to oneself, unless one believed that
moral values were objective, and that moral values would not be objective if
the world were deterministic. But the existence of real possibilities, real con-
tingencies, is merely a necessary, not a sufficient condition for objective val-
ues and norms. To make sense of our moral lives we must not only believe in
free will but we must take it that moral judgments are, indeed, judgments
subject to intellectual critique and not mere emotional responses.9
James is vividly aware of the multifarious sources of our valuations: some
are directly or indirectly connected to bodily pains and pleasures, whereas
others are immediate deliverances of human sensibility. This, he thought,
7. See the title essay in The Will to Believe for James’s argument that when a genuine
option cannot be settled on intellectual grounds we have a right to believe either alter-
native on passional grounds.
8. Dewey, in the introduction to Human Nature and Conduct, in Middle Works, vol.
14, and in The Quest for Certainty, in Later Works, vol. 4.
9. See James, “The Dilemma of Determinism.”

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was the insight of intuitionists, just as the connection with bodily pains and
pleasures is an insight of utilitarians. But in a world with only one thinker,
to use his language, values would nevertheless be entirely subjective. Truth
requires a standard outside the thinker, a standard provided by the existence
of other human beings and the fact that they take an interest in each other.
In James’s memorable image, two loving people doomed to extinction on a
rock would still, as long as they lived, have a full moral life with real goods
and real evils.10 Dewey expressed a similar thought, and a good deal else be-
sides, by saying that morality is social.11 But morality might be social and yet
wholly relative. This is not the place to examine that alternative; neither
James nor Dewey was a relativist. War is bad, not bad according to this or
that set of mores, just bad. How do we know that? Here I can hear someone
ask, “What about just wars?” Well, perhaps there are situations in which war
is the lesser evil; if so, how do we know that? This question, too, if it is asked
as a skeptical question, presupposes a false world view. In fact, the false world
view presupposed here is intimately related to the false view that, according
to Dewey, is presupposed by asking whether we have free will. How we can
know that some kind of conduct is right or wrong, some state of affairs good
or bad, is mysterious only if we have already accepted the idea that questions
of value are radically different from questions of fact, that facts are in and of
this world while values, at least moral values, are not.
Traditionally, moral values were held to be transcendent, but in the twen-
tieth century they came to be thought of as nonexistent. When values were
thought of as transcendent, it was held that they were known in a unique
way: they were intuited. But when positivistic philosophers rejected the very
idea of the transcendent, value judgments were thought to be, in the last
analysis, not judgments at all but expressions of one or another noncognitive
(emotional or volitional) state of mind.12 Dewey rejected this false world
view; he rejected the so-called fact/value distinction. Dewey pointed out
that what we call factual knowledge is shaped by our values: we inquire into
Works, 6:141–162.
11. See, e.g., Dewey, the concluding chapter of Human Nature and Conduct.
12. The former view is found in A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: V.
Golancz, 1951). The volitional alternative is presented in Hans Reichenbach, The Rise
of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951).

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matters that matter to us. Dewey noted that factual claims and value claims
are so intimately interwoven in our reasoning that one cannot challenge or
support a claim of one kind without implicating claims of the other: we
evaluate data as relevant or not, as reliable or not, inferences as valid or not,
experiments as well designed or not, and so on.
The web of beliefs includes beliefs concerning facts and beliefs concerning
values. It is anchored in experiences that are sense perceptions, those that are
enjoyments and sufferings, and those that are doings. Even this formulation
suggests too much of a multiplicity. The web of beliefs is anchored in experi-
ences that may be taken as sense perceptions or as enjoyments/sufferings or as
doings, and often are taken as any two or all of them.13 All of this is enor-
mously important, yet all of this might be accepted by a latter-day expression-
ist. All of this might be accepted, and yet one might hold that there are ends
or ideals that are not subject to critique and evaluation because they are the
ultimate standards.14 Dewey challenges the very idea of ends that are ultimate
in this sense and replaces it by the idea of ends-in-view. Ends-in-view are hu-
man responses to problems that human beings face, and they are evaluated as
human beings let their conduct be guided by them. Of course, there are values
that seem to us beyond challenge—respect for human dignity, for example—
and they may indeed survive any possible challenge; I sincerely hope so. But
we would be blind to the facts of the real world if we failed to acknowledge
that this precious value is challenged again and again wherever prisoners are
tortured or women raped. Or, to put this another way, we must steadfastly
hold respect for human dignity as an end-in-view precisely because prisoners
continue to be tortured and women continue to be raped.
To make sense of our moral lives, our choosings, our praisings and self-con-
gratulations, as well as our blamings and regrettings, 1 have argued we must
believe that we are, indeed, choosing, that our choices make a difference, and
that there are standards by which we judge and are judged, standards that are
themselves of human making and subject to human critique. Implicit in these
beliefs is another, the belief, held by each of us, that one is not alone in the
13. Of Dewey’s numerous writings on this subject I shall mention only Theory of
Valuation, in Later Works, 13:191–252. The subject is also discussed in Dewey’s Human
Nature and Conduct and Quest for Certainty.
14. For contemporary expressionism, see, e.g., Allan Gibbard, Wise Choice, Apt
Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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world, that one lives in a peopled world. Just as the fact/value dichotomy,
though useful in practical contexts, does not bear any epistemological or on-
tological weight, so the distinction between ethics and metaphysics or ethics
and epistemology bears no philosophical weight, though it is useful in drawing
up curricula and assigning responsibilities for teaching and learning. We can-
not make sense of our moral lives unless we believe that there are other people
and we live in a common world. It makes no sense for me to be careful not to
step on your big toe, if the toe I would step on is not identical with the one in
which you would feel pain, nor would it make sense for me to be careful not
to cause you pain if what I take to be your body is not a minded body, and
does not experience pain. To make philosophical sense of our moral lives, our
philosophy must underwrite our commonsense beliefs in the commonsense
world. James thought that the commonsense world is one that “our ancestors
and we, by slow cumulative strokes of choice, have extracted” out of some-
thing James in The Principles of Psychology called indifferently “the primordial
chaos of sensations” and “that black and jointless continuity of space and mov-
ing clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world.”15
Beginning in 1904, in the series of papers later published under the title
Essays in Radical Empiricism, James returned to the urgent question of how
philosophy can escape from the “congeries of solipsisms” into which
Descartes had led her and “out of which in strict logic only a God could
compose a universe even of discourse.” He proposed “pure experience” as
the “one primal stuff or material . . . out of which everything is com-
posed.”16 Pure experience as such has no essential properties; it is not a
kind of substance; it is as varied as our experiences are varied. However,
unless we are just born or are just emerging from total anesthesia, we do
not have pure experiences. Our experiences are always already conceptual-
ized, already taken to be, say, of a pen, or as being ours, as part of the
stream of thought that one calls oneself. So both you and I can take the
same pure experience to be your big toe, and yet take it also severally to be
my seeing your big toe and your seeing it. This is not the occasion to dis-
cuss the merits and difficulties of James’s theory of pure experience, I
merely want to mention that it purports to show “how two minds can

16. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism in Works, 3:4.

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know one thing.” And, James pointed out, “the decisive reason in favor of
our minds meeting in some common objects at least is that, unless I knew
that supposition, I have no motive for assuming that your mind exists at
all . . . and for me to speak of you is folly.”17
In his very sympathetic review of Essays in Radical Empiricism, Dewey
pointed out that what is truly “radical” in James’s empiricism is his insistence
that “every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real.” Unlike his
sensationalist and associationist predecessors, James took it that relations
between things are experienced and thus real. Thus, according to Dewey, he
“compelled philosophers to rethink their conclusions upon fundamental
matters.” Yet for all his enthusiasm, Dewey pointed out that James’s prema-
ture death “left the new philosophy in too undeveloped a state to win disci-
ples wholesale.”18
Using for the moment dualistic language, Jamesian pure experiences may
be characterized as intersections of a stream of thought and (an interaction
between the human organism animated by that stream and) some object.
For example, at this moment you are reading these words. That description
is itself an illustration of what James means when he says that a pure experi-
ence may be taken as part of a physical object or as part of a mind, that a
reading is an event that is at once physical and psychical. Whatever the pure
experience may be (if we were to describe it, we would already have gone
beyond the pure experience), when we call it “reading,” we may be under-
stood to refer to a physical or physiological process that ends with your un-
derstanding what the words mean.
As mentioned, the normal adult in normal circumstances does not have
(is not conscious of having) “pure” experiences; one’s conscious interactions
with one’s environment are always already conceptualized. To be sure, an
experience, Dewey held, need not be cognitive; it may be an enjoyment or a
suffering or, again, a doing—it is quite often all of these things. It is precisely
because we are not mere spectators of but actors in the world that I need to
worry about stepping on your big toe, and it is precisely because I can step
on your toe (because we do not merely see but handle objects in the world)
17. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, in Works, vol. 3, quotes on 37–38, 4, 46,
and 38, respectively.
18. Dewey, Review of Essays in Radical Empiricism, in Middle Works, 7:148.

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that you and I can mean the same thing. The philosopher’s problem is not
the insoluble problem of inferring or constructing a common and relatively
stable world out of private and fleeting sense data; the very notion of a sense
datum is the result of a sophisticated analysis of ordinary sense perception
guided by knowledge of the very world that is supposed to be called into
question.19 Jamesian pure experiences are, of course, not sense data, not an
interface interposed between a questing mind and the world that is its quest;
nevertheless, because the normal adult in normal circumstances does not
have pure experiences, one cannot help but think that a world of pure expe-
rience is too much of a concession to idealism.20
Dewey begins with events. Like Jamesian pure experiences, Deweyan
events are essentially neither mental nor physical. They are taken as one or
the other (or both) after the fact. Experiencing is a taking, an interaction of
the organism with its environment, an environment that includes others like
it. Of course, one can ask how you and I can succeed to mean the same
thing, but we ask it in concrete situations. When you say, “Let’s divide this
responsibility fairly,” do you mean what I mean? How can we find out; how
can we avoid a quarrel? When I say, “Let’s meet in front of the post office,”
is that unambiguous? Will we actually meet? But experience also tells us that
we often, more often than not, succeed in our efforts to communicate. We
do indeed inhabit a common world and share a vast body of beliefs. Only
against this background of success do we experience failures to communicate
and disagreements in our beliefs concerning how the world is and ought to
19. That point was made forcefully by Dewey in “The Existence of the World as a
Logical Problem,” in Middle Works, 8:83–97.
20. James’s colleague at Harvard, Josiah Royce, and F. H. Bradley in England,
among others, offered absolute idealism as a solution to the problem of how language
or thought hooks on to the world, how it is that for me to speak of you is not folly.
James found this philosophy profoundly unsatisfactory and offered his radical empir-
icism as an alternative solution. But I am suggesting that his life-long struggle against
absolute idealism left its mark on his philosophy. James’s relationship to Bradley is the
subject of T. L. S. Sprigge, James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality
(Chicago: Open Court Press, 1993). His relation to Royce is examined by James
Conant in “The James/Royce Dispute and the Development of James’s ‘Solution,’” in
The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press, 1997).

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be, and what is important and what does not matter, etc., etc., and only
within this common world can we find answers to these problems.21
To summarize: to make sense of our moral lives we need to believe that
there are other people with whom we share a common world and that our
actions can make a difference to what that world will become. Moral action
(good or bad, right or wrong) is action that is chosen for reasons, among
which are moral judgments, judgments that are as objective, and as fallible,
as anything else that human beings believe. Both James and Dewey would
have agreed with this. What then is the difference between them? It seems to
me that in each case James accepts the received problematique.
No amount of humanly accessible evidence will decide whether we have
free will and whether there are real possibilities—in other words, whether we
can initiate causal chains. So James decides the question on passional grounds.
Now, I think that having done that, James has pulled the rug from under the
original question, but he does not pursue that point. Dewey, in contrast, sees
the original question as a diversion, an attempt to distract us from facing a
multitude of concrete and vitally important infractions of the liberty of real
human beings. Given James’s radical empiricism, the view that anything real is
experienced and vice versa, values are real if and only if they are experienced.
James believes both that our valuings begin with immediate feelings, that
is, experiences, and that values are real—there are objective standards.
Moreover, when we consider the complex values called ideals, it is clear that
these are to be tested by seeing how attempts to realize them will work out.
Once again, Dewey would agree with all this, but it is Dewey and not James
to whom we owe the trenchant critique of the fact/value dichotomy. James
rejects skepticism out of hand: if we are skeptics, there is no job left for the
philosopher; he argues against subjectivism. In a curious sense, although in
the end his method for settling moral disputes is empirical, James’s prob-
lematique assumes a fact/value distinction that is never formally repudiated.
Once again, James accepts a traditional philosophical challenge while Dewey
denies the very ground upon which that challenge is mounted.
21. See Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct and The Quest for Certainty, as well as
Essays in Experimental Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916), the essays of
which are reprinted across several volumes of the Middle Works. Although this essay
deals only with James and Dewey, I want to mention in passing that Peirce’s philoso-
phy of perception also escapes the “congeries of solipsisms.”

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I am inclined to maintain that the same difference manifests itself also in

their approaches to the problems of our knowledge of the external world, of
the existence of other minds, and of intentionality—three problems that
stand and fall together. James takes the problems seriously; he struggles
throughout his philosophical career against the idealist solution precisely
because that solution fails to make sense of his moral life. His own solution,
the neutral monism of his radical empiricism, undermines, to be sure, the
very basis of the problem; there can be no “congeries of solipsisms” in a
world of pure experience. Dewey’s experiences are as neutral as James’s pure
experiences. The difference, to my mind, is once again that Dewey—I mean,
of course, the later Dewey—refuses to play the game, to enter into the phil-
osophical discussion on the terms offered by the tradition.
Both James and Dewey, I have argued, are making sense of our moral lives;
they do so in opposition to philosophical views dominant in their times. Part
of the difference in their modes of argumentation and in their starting points
can be explained by the fact that I have contrasted James with the later Dewey,
a James whose opponents are Royce and Bradley with a Dewey whose oppo-
nents are Russell and the logical positivists. Yet the difference seems to me to
be deeper, more significant than that. I am inclined to say that James speaks
from inside the philosophical tradition; he takes its problems seriously. His
answers, to be sure, lead him beyond the tradition. In contrast, when he wrote
his later works, Dewey had already achieved a position outside the tradition, a
tradition that reflected and supported social distinctions that he sought pas-
sionately to overcome. For Dewey, in the period between the two world wars,
philosophy is politics, in spite of his preface to Talks to Teachers.22 I do not
think the connection was ever that intimate for James.
22. James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology [1899], in Works, vol. 10. In the preface,
James describes his philosophy as leading to “the well-known democratic respect for
the sacredness of individuality” and uses the occasion to express his opposition to the
U.S. imperialist adventure in the Philippines.

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23
The Moral Life of a Pragmatist
Ruth Anna Putnam
THE TITLE of William James’s only systematic essay in moral philoso-

phy—“The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”—suggests that serious
systematic thought about morality needs to focus on a whole life. Bernard
Williams has suggested that a life consisting of a string of dutiful actions
chosen one by one simply because they are dutiful does not deserve to be
called a life, for an agent leading such a life would be unable to pursue
any projects of her own.1 James has taken this thought at least one step
further. For him, choosing what to do, when the choice is a difficult moral
question, is choosing who one is going to be. Who one is, or is going to
be, and what projects one will pursue turn out to be two ways of looking
at the same problem. But one’s character and one’s ends play crucial roles
in one’s moral life not only at moments of difficult choice but also during
tranquil periods. Here I want to expound some of James’s writings in or-
der to examine the place of character and of ends in our moral lives.
Specifically, part 1 provides a brief survey of the moral life, part 2 exam-
ines the interdependence of character and ends, part 3 raises some further
questions about character, and part 4 examines James’s standard of an
“inclusive ideal.”
1. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge:


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T H E MOR A L L IFE OF A PR AGM AT IST 361
In an early talk James asked, “What makes a Life Significant?” and concluded,
Culture and refinement alone are not enough to do so. Ideal aspirations are
not enough when uncombined with pluck and will. But neither are pluck and
will, dogged endurance and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all
alone. There must be some fusion, some chemical combination among these
principles, for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result.2
James mentioned that “culture and refinement” do not suffice for a significant
life. Here I want to emphasize that they are also not necessary. That the lives of
people living precariously and simply may be rich in significance was brought
home to James when he encountered poor farmers creating clearings for them-
selves in the mountains of North Carolina. These farmers and their families,
though they worked hard from sunup to sundown and lacked anything that
might be called “culture and refinement,” told James that “we ain’t happy here
unless we are getting one of these coves under cultivation.”3 What they had in
addition to what James would call an “ideal,” namely the goal to get a cove
under cultivation, and in addition to “pluck and will” was just enough to eat
to keep them healthy enough to pursue their ideal with “dogged endurance.”
Thus, culture and refinement are not required for a significant life, but human
beings so deprived of the necessities of life that they are unable to formulate,
however inarticulately, some goal or aim or purpose that makes sense of the
daily routine beyond that routine itself, or so deprived that they are unable to
pursue their goals with some chance of success, cannot be said to lead signifi-
cant lives. Here one should also mention the need for positive relationships
with other human beings. Social isolation can be, and for most persons is, as
debilitating as lack of the material necessities of life.
James emphasizes not only that the moral life requires “pluck and will,
dogged endurance and insensibility to danger,” but also that this “strenuous
mood” can be sustained only if one believes “that acts are really good and
bad,” and that involves, for him, both a belief in indeterminism and in the
objectivity of moral values.4 Morality, objective values, and with them obli-

3. Ibid., 134.

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gations exist whenever there are persons who care for one another. “One
rock with two loving souls upon it . . . would have as thoroughly moral a
constitution as any possible world. . . . There would be real good things and
real bad things . . . obligations, claims and expectations; obediences, refusals,
and disappointments . . . a moral life, whose active energy would have no
limit but the intensity of interest in each other.”5 Objectivity in ethics de-
pends, then, on the possibility of resolving conflicts, of arriving at shared
values, of jointly espousing more inclusive ideals. That possibility rests on
the fact that we have sympathetic as well as egoistic instincts, which “arise,
so far as we can tell, on the same psychological level.”6 However, for James,
objectivity is more than mere intersubjectivity. His insistence on the imper-
fections of the world and on the possibility of moral progress suggests that
there is a standard outside not only this or that thinker but outside any
particular collection of them, just as scientific truth is not determined by the
opinions of any particular collection of scientists. “There can be no final
truth in ethics any more than in physics until the last man has had his expe-
rience and said his say.”7 In ethics, though not in physics, this notion of a
final truth seems to be clearly distinguishable from belief in a divine thinker.
For, though James says that “ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a
universe where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where
there is a God as well,” he also asserts that “in a merely human world with-
out a God, the appeal to our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimu-
lating power. Life, to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical
symphony; but it is played in the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and
the infinite scale of values fails to open up.”8 I want to put this aside.9 The
5. Ibid., 150.
8. Ibid., 150, 160.
9. James clearly believed in a God who cared about his creation. James believed both
that God needed our help in making the world a better place for his creatures and that
he, in a sense, guaranteed our success in that endeavor. James believed not only, as we all
do, that our efforts can make a difference to how the world will be—that there are causal
lines that run through our persons—but also that we have free will—that we can and do
initiate causal chains. While these beliefs may well serve as motivating factors, they can-
not in any sense help us to know what ideals to embrace, what persons to be, for we
cannot read God’s mind. I shall set this question aside for another occasion.

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important point to retain is the idea that we do not have the final truth, that
we can and must continue to learn in ways that will alter not only our beliefs
but also our behavior. For this caring and other altruistic virtues are as indis-
pensable as courage, determination, and endurance. We may take it, there-
fore, that a fuller account of the virtues would for James include the altruis-
tic virtues as well as the executive virtues mentioned in the passage
concerning life’s significance.
Finally, what about “ideal aspirations?” In order to lead significant lives, hu-
man beings need enough of the necessities of life to be able to formulate some
goal or have some purpose that will make sense of the routine of their lives.
Routine alone does not give meaning to one’s life, although it may carry one
across some meaningless stretches, keep one going while one sorts things out or
simply waits for things to sort themselves out. Habits work in the same way.
Indeed, a well-established routine becomes a habit, and a firm habit will, in
novel circumstances, establish a new routine. What routines and habits do for
us is to obviate the necessity to decide at every moment what to do next; they
provide an easy explanation of a host of actions. Without thinking, one gets up
at a certain hour because one always gets up at that hour. The luxury and the
difficulty of vacations consists in part in being able to stay in bed, hence in
having to decide to get up. One gets up at the right hour because one has to go
to work. Retirement removes that reason. Hence the danger of not getting up,
of feeling that life has lost its purpose because it has lost its rhythm. Children
who have looked forward to school vacation with great eagerness become bored
and cranky after a few days’ vacation. Because their activities are not structured,
they say, “There is nothing to do,” although much could be done.
However, structure is not enough. There can be too much structure, as in
a slave-labor camp, or a structure of despair, as is a famine relief camp, where
the days consist in waiting for the next doling out of food and there is no
energy to fill periods of waiting with anything other than waiting. These
people do not flourish, not merely because they are hungry, exhausted, ill,
and, in the former case, mistreated, but because life does not derive its pur-
pose from routine. Rather, most people have purposes that impose a routine,
or if the routine varies frequently, or leaves much to be decided from day to
day, one’s purpose gives one’s life a shape, guides one’s choices, and explains
one’s activities. Or again one’s purpose may be only indirectly related to
one’s routine; one may spend one’s days doing a job that is just a job—any
other would do as well—in order to support one’s family. Or one may work

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at a routine job for the sake of having free time and a free mind to do what
one really wants to do after hours. Think of a musician who makes her living
as a waitress and composes in her “free” time. We must then look at pur-
poses, projects, ideals, or plans.
Purposes, projects, ideals give shape or coherence to a life or at any rate lon-
ger or shorter periods thereof. They loom large in forming what John Rawls
calls, perhaps too grandly, a rational life plan (most people’s plans are neither as
long-range nor as passionless as that term suggests). But our students do decide
that they want to be philosophers or lawyers or whatever and so they put their
energy, their time, and a good deal of their emotions into learning to be a phi-
losopher or a lawyer or whatever. Many of their daily and even longer-range
priorities are ordered by these aims. A few may also plan when to fall in love,
and when to get married, when to have children, etc., though we “adults” sus-
pect that these are the kinds of plans that go often awry. In other walks of life,
in other times or places, these matters seem to be determined to a large extent
by the society and/or the circumstances of one’s birth. Generations of coal min-
ers grew up expecting to work in the mines and did so; generations of civil
servants raised their children to be civil servants, etc. In those circumstances it
takes courage and imagination to pursue another path. Some projects (e.g.,
becoming a world-class concert pianist) require more planning—more years as
well as more hours of each day are covered by the plan—than others (e.g., read-
ing all of George Eliot’s novels). I am interested here in projects and ideals and
their bearing on moral life; I am not interested in plans as such.
Projects explain, and within limits justify, what one does by showing how
that action fits into the life dominated by that project. Gauguin’s leaving his
family in order to paint fits into his life in this justifying way. Character plays
a similar role; it too shapes a life and determines what is fittingly done in
that life. When at the end of Portrait of a Lady Isabel Archer refuses the love
of Caspar Goodwin and returns to her unlovely husband, she does what fits
into her life, what befits the person she has chosen to be.
I do not mean to suggest that every action needs moral justification.
Dewey, who agrees with James in emphasizing the centrality of the moral
life, points out that it would be morbid to subject each act to moral scrutiny;
a well-formed moral character knows when to raise moral issues.10 But
10. Dewey, Ethics, rev. ed., in Later Works, 7:12.

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choices that affect one’s own life over a considerable period of time and
choices that affect the lives of others (the choices just mentioned fall into
both categories) do raise moral issues, issues that cannot be settled ade-
quately unless one inquires how the contemplated alternatives would fit into
the agent’s life as well as how they would affect the lives of others. It is the
great merit of James, as of Dewey, to have suggested that the moral life
should be the center of attention in our moral philosophizing. How, then,
do projects and characters shape a moral life?
In “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” James distinguishes three
questions “which must be kept apart”:
The psychological question asks after the historical origin of our moral ideas
and judgments; the metaphysical question asks what the very meaning of the
words “good,” “ill,” and “obligation” are; the casuistic question asks what is
the measure of the various goods and ills which men recognize, so that the
philosopher may settle the true order of human obligations.11
From the perspective of living a moral life, the casuistic question is cen-
tral. In our private lives, though not for the philosopher qua philosopher,
that question comes itself in two forms—it may focus on choosing goals and
the means thereto or it may focus on choosing who one is to be—as James
makes clear in the following crucial paragraph from The Principles of
Psychology:
We reach the plane of Ethics, where choice reigns notoriously supreme. An

act has no ethical quality whatsoever unless it be chosen out of several all
equally possible. To sustain the arguments for the good course and keep them
ever before us, to stifle our longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot
unflinchingly on the arduous path, these are characteristic ethical energies.
But more than these; for these but deal with the means of compassing inter-
Works, 6:141–162, 142.

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ests already felt by the man to be supreme. The ethical energy par excellence
has to go farther and choose which interest out of several, equally coercive,
shall become supreme. . . . When he debates, Shall I commit this crime?
choose that profession? accept that office or marry this fortune? his choice
really lies between one of several equally possible future Characters. What he
shall become is fixed by the conduct of this moment. Schopenhauer, who
enforces his determinism by the argument that with a given character only
one reaction is possible under given circumstances, forgets that, in these crit-
ical ethical moments, what consciously seems to be in question is the com-
plexion of character itself. The problem with the man is less what act he shall
now choose to do, than what being he shall now resolve to become.12
James contrasts in this paragraph what I shall call “normal moral life”
with “critical ethical moments.” That is not, nor do I mean to suggest that
he thought it was, a hard and fast distinction, but making it enables us to
begin to chart the moral life. The choices of normal moral life are made
against a background of (relatively) stable values by a (relatively) stable char-
acter in more of less stable conditions and not very surprising situations.
Even in normal moral life there are two types of choice situation, which
seem to be related to ends and character, respectively: sometimes one decides
what to do; sometimes one has to resist the temptation not to do what one
has chosen. In normal moral life an agent has goals, principles, values, not
all of which can be realized. Thus she must choose among alternative courses
of action. Presumably, she wants to maximize what she values, which may
include others’ welfare as well as her own, doing her duty as well as not suc-
cumbing to temptation. The course of action she chooses and pursues may,
of course, prove to be less felicitous than she had hoped. That will be a rea-
son for reexamination, reevaluation, a change of course. Be that as it may,
after she has chosen “the good course,” an agent needs to be ever vigilant lest
she succumb to temptation. Resisting temptation is rather different from
choosing how best to accomplish one’s aims. It is, for example, one thing to
decide to follow a strict diet rather than to use medication to control one’s
cholesterol level; it is another thing to resist the temptation to violate the
diet. Nevertheless, to stick with the diet is after all to decide yet again that
one prefers diet to medication, on the assumption all along that one prefers
12. James, Principles, in Works, 8:287–288.

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a lower cholesterol level. That is why James speaks of “sustaining the argu-
ment.” Being resolute and having a certain goal in any serious sense turn out
to be intimately connected. For pragmatists it makes no sense to say that
someone has a certain purpose but does nothing to further it. With common
sense they will say, “If she doesn’t diet, then she doesn’t really want to lower
her cholesterol level.” James goes beyond making this point and finds such a
person contemptible. “The more ideals a man has, the more contemptible”
we deem him if he lacks the virtues required “to get them realized.”13
A critical moment is a situation in which, according to James, one chooses
which of several equally coercive interests shall become supreme, which of
several equally possible characters one shall become. Here too it may be well
to begin by distinguishing between choosing a supreme, life-shaping interest
and choosing what kind of person one is to be, though it will become appar-
ent that these are, as James’s words suggest, two aspects of the one problem.
Consider this rather simple case—one is almost tempted to say it belongs to
normal moral life. A young woman about to graduate from college finds that
she has interest and considerable ability in two fields; she could become, let
us say, a philosopher or a biologist. Here we want to say that she chooses
between two interests, she cannot pursue both, and whichever she chooses
will be supreme in her life from then on. At first blush this does not seem to
be much of a choice of character. In either case, she chooses to develop the
virtues of a scholar; in either case, she may or may not become viciously
competitive, she may or may not subordinate friendships and family life to
her career, etc. These later choices, on the other hand, do appear to be
choices of character. Someone might choose not to become an academic of
any kind because she does not want to be tempted (or, as it might appear to
her, forced) to subordinate her personal relationships to her professional life.
But what then determines our young woman’s choice? Presumably, if her
interests and abilities are indeed equally balanced, it is that one of the alter-
natives promises a life in which she can satisfy more of her other longings.
Perhaps she believes that she can be more useful as a biologist, so that be-
13. James, Talks to Teachers, in Works, 10:164. I have discussed choices in normal
moral life. It is worth pointing out, however, that the choices of normal moral life tend
to be relatively rare, or at least are hardly noticed. Our priorities are set and almost
dictate our course of action. Our habits, virtuous and otherwise, enable us to act in
familiar situations almost without thinking.

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coming a philosopher appears to her as becoming a self-indulgent person,

and that is not what she wishes to become. Perhaps she believes that a biol-
ogist’s long hours in the laboratory are less compatible with raising children
than a philosopher’s work in her study at home. She does not see herself as
choosing the person she wants to be, yet her choice expresses her personality.
The young woman is choosing a life, or at any rate a probable life, and in so
choosing she chooses to become the sort of person who, with luck, will lead
that sort of life both successfully and contentedly. That choice requires
self-knowledge, for surely even if she sides with James as against Schopenhauer,
one cannot become just anyone one chooses to be. One person who com-
mits a crime will be destroyed by remorse even if she is not caught, while
another will take pride in her accomplishment if she is not caught and be-
wail her “bad luck” if she is.14
It is important to emphasize here that choosing what “being [one] shall
now resolve to become” does not refer to any egocentric preoccupation with
self, nor to a hyperfastidious concern to keep one’s hands clean. Neither is it
a simple reminder that whatever one may deliberate about, one’s action will
affect oneself as well as others. Nor finally, is it an invitation to ignore others
and the effects of our choices on them. Rather, the central point made here
is that some of our moral choices will change us radically, while others will
do so, if at all, only slowly and in minor ways. Alternatively, some of our
moral choices deliberately and dramatically reaffirm our characters, while
others simply reflect the being we are. Thus, when Isabel Archer returns to
Osmond, she reaffirms the character she has become, has made herself
through her decisions to remain with Osmond and to remain with him in
spite of his utter selfishness. When Gauguin chooses to go to Tahiti and be
a painter rather than to stay with his family and continue to work in his of-
fice, he chooses both which interest is to be supreme in his life and the kind
of person he is to be, namely the sort of person who can live with the thought
that he has left his family and who can devote himself single-mindedly to
painting, or do so at least sufficiently to justify his choice.
Bernard Williams discussed Gauguin (a slightly fictionalized Gauguin) in
order to draw attention to the role of moral luck in our moral lives, in order
14. For a different account of moral choice in critical moments, see Owen Flanagan,
“Identity and Strong and Weak Evaluation,” in Identity, Character and Morality, ed. O.
Flanagan and A. Rorty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

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to make the distinction between normal moral life and what might be called
“existential” choices (James’s critical moments), choices that cannot be justi-
fied at the time of choosing by their reasonably anticipated consequences
because success, in these cases, cannot be foreseen.15 With some modifica-
tion and elaboration, that same case can be used to explore the interdepen-
dence of character and ends. The Gauguin here envisaged is a family man
who is keenly aware of his family responsibilities; he is also a man who
(unlike Williams, in least in his discussion of the case) recognizes and deeply
feels a moral obligation to realize his talents as a painter. After agonized re-
flection he decides that he must abandon his family in order to realize his
talents as a painter. One might say, then, that he knows that he will shirk
some duty whatever he does, but he can be sure of doing something right
only if he stays with his family. But can he? If he chose to stay, he might
come to see his family as nothing but a burden, a source of perpetual irrita-
tion. We may imagine that as the years go by, he becomes more and more
morose, perhaps even abusive; perhaps in the end he takes to drink. That, of
course, represents a failure of character, and one might say at that point that
he should have known himself well enough to know that he would not be
able to bring it off. Just so, if he goes to Tahiti but succumbs to Polynesian
life and fails to paint at all, or paints only rarely and fitfully, one would say
that he should have known himself better. There is, then, a connection be-
tween the person one is and the kind of interest one can justifiably make
supreme. Just as a person who needs to be physically active should not
choose a desk job, or someone excessively shy should not choose to be a re-
ceptionist, so too one’s moral strengths and weaknesses are relevant to one’s
critical moral choices. Just as Gauguin, according to Williams, was unable to
know whether he had a genuine talent, so one is unable to know one’s char-
acter, how one will react and behave in unfamiliar situations. Still, both with
respect to one’s talents and with respect to one’s character and personality,
one is not entirely in the dark, one can often know of weaknesses that should
preclude certain alternatives.
However, Gauguin might have turned out to be a merely mediocre
painter, someone who painted steadily and conscientiously but never pro-
duced a work of museum quality. Would Williams regard that as a justifying
15. Williams, Moral Luck.

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success? I assume not, since one would hardly say of such a man that he “is
a genuinely gifted painter who can succeed in doing genuinely valuable
work.”16 Nevertheless, I would say of such a man that his decision and sub-
sequent actions fit into his life and were justified, if one is ever justified to
abandon one’s family in pursuit of the realization of one’s talents. Consider
a parallel case. One could say of Martin Luther King Jr. that he abandoned
his family when he devoted himself to a cause that would almost certainly
lead to periods of imprisonment and perhaps to an early, violent death.
What justified King’s choice was his profound commitment to social justice
and his conviction that he could best further that cause by becoming a
highly visible, highly exposed leader in that struggle. What King could not
know, as Gauguin could not have known the extent of his talents, was how
competent and inspiring a leader he would prove to be, how visible he would
become, how much he would contribute to the success of the civil rights
movement. Others whose talents were more limited or merely different, who
played lesser roles and contributed in a more limited way or less visible ways,
made the same choice out of the same deep commitment. We do not doubt
that they were as justified as was King himself. I am suggesting that if one is
justified in putting one ideal above another, in slighting one obligation for
the sake of another, then one’s success in realizing that ideal is not nearly as
morally important as Williams suggests. Only failure due to one’s moral
failings, which may include self-deception, is morally relevant.
Gauguin’s case enables us to see that one’s character may be particularly

suitable or unsuitable to one’s projects, so that one should attempt to know
oneself and take that self-knowledge into account in choosing one’s projects.
Osmond’s case provides an example of a man whose project seems almost
determined by his character. Osmond’s aesthetic sensibility leads him to col-
lect fine things. His selfishness allows him to pursue that project at the ex-
pense of other people’s happiness. Given his poverty, he could not have pur-
sued it otherwise. So it is his total character that enables him to make the
interest in fine things supreme.
16. Ibid., 26.

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Paul Seabright has suggested yet another way in which character and
projects may be related. According to Seabright’s reading of Portrait of a
Lady, Isabel Archer is a woman who makes it her project to have a certain
character. Seabright raises questions concerning the possibility of such a
project. In particular, he argues that “character may be subverted by the de-
sire to have or to form character” because one would concentrate one’s atten-
tion inward, on one’s being generous, rather than outward to discern situa-
tions that call for generosity and then to act accordingly.17 In her comment
on that paper Martha Nussbaum points out that if Seabright’s concerns were
to remain unanswered, they would undermine a character-based ethics.18
She then argues that in the Aristotelian sense of the word, the aim to have a
good character is not self-subverting in the manner suggested by Seabright.
“So the motivation to be a just person is supposed to be a motive that is what
we might call morally transparent: it is focused not upon the agent as the
author of the act, but directly upon the act itself, and its valuable character-
istics.”19 That seems to be right. Nussbaum is also right to point out that
Henry James understands how one might become a just person through a
process of education that would focus the attention of the learner away from
her own future role and to the problems that are to be solved. Lord Warburton
is the result of just such an education. But that reflection gives rise to a re-
lated problem.
Every action is an interaction; it changes both the world and the agent.
This appears to lead to paradox. It is easy enough to understand that charac-
ter limits the choices that are actually open to the agent, that are what James
calls “live options,” but then it appears that the adult agent willy-nilly rein-
forces her virtues as well as her vices. The child, on the other hand, has her
virtues reinforced and her vices discouraged by others. That does not quite
say that one could never have chosen other than as one did choose, but it
does seem to say that our choices only reinforce our character—pharaoh’s
heart can only become more hardened, criminals are beyond redemption,
but the good may be trusted implicitly. What then would be the point of
17. Paul Seabright, “The Pursuit of Unhappiness: Paradoxical Motivation and the
Subversion of Character in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady,” Ethics 98 (1988): 313–
331, 314.
18. Martha Nussbaum, “Comment on Paul Seabright,” Ethics 98 (1988): 332–340.
19. Ibid., 333–334.

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moral philosophy that emphasizes the critical role of character; how could
we ever be said to choose who we want to be?
The problem just raised seems to be the hoary problem of free will. James,
as is well known, believed in free will, but an ethics that emphasizes charac-
ter development can be shown to be empirically grounded and thus practi-
cally relevant without an appeal to free will. James points out that new hab-
its can be and are formed as the result of new experiences. “Now life abounds
in these, and sometimes they are such critical and revolutionary experiences
that they change a man’s whole scale of values and system of ideas. In such
cases, the old order of his habits will be ruptured: and if the new motives are
lasting, new habits will be formed, and build up in him a new or regenerate
‘nature.’”20 There are examples of sudden conversions, but for the most part,
the dynamics of character formation or character change in the adult must
be understood as a slow process. All of us know regretfully of virtues lost
through neglect, and perhaps some of us know of virtues gained through
determined vigilance. As one’s children grow up, one is apt to lose that spe-
cial vigilance without which they would not have survived their early years;
in its place one learns to develop a certain toughness, and ability to let them
get into trouble and to let them extricate themselves by themselves. Luck,
good or ill, may prompt other changes. A man who has always been de-
manding and impatient may learn to be helpful and patient when his wife
becomes seriously ill. It is not the case, then, that as adults we are reduced to
reinforcing our already settled characters. Life presents us again and again
with the opportunity to change, to grow. We must grasp these opportunities
lest we diminish. This point is made most emphatically by John Dewey.
“Everywhere,” he says, “there is an opportunity and a need to go beyond
what one has been, beyond . . . the body of desires, affections, and habits
which has been potent in the past. . . . The good person is precisely the one
who is . . . the most concerned to find openings for the newly forming or
growing self.”21
Because James believes that we can form our own character, he offers
advice on how to form habits. This advice is directed not merely at teachers
attempting to aid their students in developing good habits but at anyone
20. James, Talks to Teachers, in Works, 10:53.

21. Dewey, Ethics, in Middle Works, 5:173–174.

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committed to leading a moral life. He tells, for example, a cautionary tale

concerning Darwin, who is said to have lost the ability to enjoy poetry be-
cause he failed to read it regularly. He states in at least two separate publica-
tions: “Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise
every day.”22 For, according to James, “the deepest difference, practically, in
the moral life . . . is the difference between the easy-going and the strenuous
mood,” and it is the latter that James advocates again and again.23
If James is right, we have some control over who we shall continue to be
and how we slowly change during normal moral life, and in critical moments
we sometimes have the opportunity to change quite dramatically. The man
whose wife has become seriously and permanently disabled is caused by that
event to ask himself what kind of a man, what kind of a husband, he is and
wants to be. He could have left her care to strangers; he could have provided
only minimally for her needs. Instead, so I imagine, he realizes for the first
time how self-centered and neglectful he has been, and he decides to change,
to learn to be sensitive to her needs, to do within his means what is best for her.
Who is this man who realizes what kind of man he was, whose remorse
does not concern a particular “uncharacteristic” action but his conduct over
many years, who wants to become a “new man”? Who is the self that can say,
“I don’t like myself,” that can decide to change? James distinguishes a num-
ber of different selves, but the self here at issue is what he calls the “social
self.”24 The voice of conscience is for James the voice of real or imagined
others. We learn our values, our principles, our image of a worthy person
from parents, teachers, friends, the society in which we grow up and live.
Nevertheless, for James, though we learn our morality from the human be-
ings that surround us, morality is ultimately not relative to culture or tradi-
tion. Moral progress—the search for and realization of ever more inclusive
ideals—requires that one reach beyond one’s actual social self toward a po-
tential or ideal social self, a social self approved of by an ideal judge.25 For
James, that ideal judge is God, but it suffices for the purposes of this essay
that reflection prompted by “new experiences” may cause one not only to
regret this or that action but to resolve to change one’s habits and to become
22. James, Talk to Teachers, in Works, 10:52, and Principles, in Works, 8:126.
24. James, Principles, in Works, 8:293.
25. Ibid., 315.

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a different person. Both the self one is and the self one seeks to become are
what one’s intelligence and temperament make of one’s experiences and of
the fortunately somewhat incoherent influences of one’s society.
A life is not a string of actions chosen one by one. A life has a shape, a co-
herence due to the character and aims of the person whose life it is. So far this
essay has paid more attention to character than to ideals, although these were
seen to be closely connected, especially in critical moments. Still, knowing a
person’s character does not suffice to tell one her ideals. Moreover, when James
concentrates on the casuistic question as it confronts the philosopher qua phi-
losopher, he speaks of ideals. The moral philosopher is to bring the ideals she
finds into a coherent system. We therefore must turn now to ideals.
What, then, is an ideal? In “What Makes a Life Significant” James tells us

that an ideal must be something “intellectually conceived” and that it must
contain “novelty,” but again he does not quite mean what he says. He is, in
that essay, weighing a Tolstoyan admiration for the virtues of simple peas-
ants against the sense that, after all, the virtues, any virtues, are of greater
worth “to the universe” if “the possessor of these virtues is in an educated
situation, working out far-reaching tasks.” He admits that to keep out of the
gutter may be for many a “legitimate and engrossing ideal,” having just said
that we do not raise monuments to laborers in the subway because they en-
dure their long hours and hard toil only “to gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of
beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, and to begin again the next day and
shirk as much as one can.”26 Finally, James recognizes that for many the ideal
will always be to cling to the familiar goods. For James, we may conclude, an
ideal is not any object of desire; rather, it is the sort of conception, aim, or
project that shapes a significant part of a life, either the life of an individual
or that of a community. Thus James speaks of the philosopher’s ideal of “a
genuine universe from the ethical point of view,” which sets her a lifelong
task, and of the “punitive ideal” (i.e., the notion of retributive justice), which
has thus far shaped criminal law.27
Why, then, are ideals a necessary ingredient in a significant life? We have
26. James, Talks to Teachers, in Works, 10:159–163.

27. James, The Will to Believe, in Works, 6:141, 144.

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learned from the Greeks that the moral life is an examined life; it requires the
opportunity to reflect. What one reflects upon may be the sort of person one
is or wishes to be; or it may be the ends, the projects, and ideals that make one’s
life a life. One examines and reaffirms actions, habits, and customs that lead to
or maintain desired ends; one criticizes and changes actions, habits, and cus-
toms that fail to accomplish one’s projects or to realize one’s ideals. Ends, in
turn, may be reconsidered, reshaped, even replaced by other ends because
(changed) circumstances make their attainment impossible or because we find
that they can be realized only at a cost we are unwilling to pay. Thus, “separate
but equal” was rejected by our society because separate was found to be inher-
ently unequal, but we still seek that elusive balance of freedom and equality
called justice. Or painting in Tahiti enables (the real) Gauguin to provide for
his family and to give full play to his creativity and talent.
The claim, central to pragmatist ethics, that there can be no moral life
without reflection and no reflection without ideals, projects, aims, ends in
view needs defending. One objection against it is that reflection is a rather
cerebral activity, so that demanding reflection seems to relegate a lot of sim-
ple people, people who are kind, who “see” what is amiss and how it is to be
helped, who do the right thing habitually, etc., to a lower moral rank than
they deserve. Insistence on reflection appears to be intellectual snobbery.
The answer to that is, I think, twofold. First, it is the objector rather than the
pragmatist who thinks that “simple people” (Tolstoyan peasants?) are inca-
pable of moral growth through reflection. We know that some of those who
courageously saved Jews from the Nazis—men and women who rejected
both the conventional wisdom of timidity and the dominant antisemi-
tism—were simple people with only an elementary education. To be sure,
the first move toward saving a Jew was often done “without thinking,” as
something one just had to do, but in the days, the weeks, and sometimes the
months to come, reflection was inevitable, not only reflection on how best
to achieve the aim of saving this Jew but on whether to continue with the
dangerous endeavor. Second, in fortunate circumstances the results of reflec-
tion may not be any startling deviation from the norm; it may show itself
only in doing better what everyone says ought to be done. Seeing better, in
the sense emphasized by Murdoch, is itself a result of reflection.28 Finally, a
sense of doing the right thing, or having done the right thing, without
28. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken, 1971).

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thinking, and hence without choosing, is a common constituent of normal

moral life and may well occur without any subsequent reflection. That is
quite compatible with Dewey’s claim that moral growth, whether in the in-
dividual or in the society, requires reflection.29
Let us now turn to reflection on ideals. This is one form of the casuistic
question (the other being reflection on one’s own present and future character).
Here James distinguishes between the philosopher qua philosopher and the
individual moral agent. The philosopher’s task is to weave the ideals she “finds
existing in the world” into “the unity of a stable system,” while the task of the
individual moral agent is to “seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to
vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good that we
can see.”30 The crucial difference here is that the moral philosopher is to be
impartial—she finds ideals existing in the world—while the moral agent will
and should favor her own ideals while being, as far as possible, respectful of
those of others. Moral agents, not moral philosophers, are the engines of moral
progress. “Although a man always risks much when he breaks away from estab-
lished rules and strives to realize a larger ideal whole than they permit, yet the
philosopher must allow that it is at all times open to anyone to make the exper-
iment, provided he fear not to stake his life and character upon the throw.”31
Once again, ideals and character are found to be inextricably intertwined.
It is apparent from the above that James is a consequentialist. However, al-
though he wrote that pragmatism agrees “with utilitarianism in emphasizing
practical aspects” and dedicated Pragmatism to the memory of John Stuart
Mill, he is not a utilitarian in the Benthamite sense, because he is not a hedo-
nist.32 A distinction made repeatedly by John Dewey, the distinction between
valuing and evaluation, prizings and appraising is useful here.33 What James
29. For a more sustained discussion of the role of reflection in our moral lives, and
in particular of Tolstoyan peasants, see Owen Flanagan, “Identity.”
30. James, The Will to Believe, in Works, 6:141–142, 158.
31. Ibid., 156.
32. James, Essays in Philosophy, in Works, 5:32. My colleague Ken Winkler correctly
pointed out that John Stuart Mill was also not a hedonist. It would lead too far afield
to examine the differences between James and Mill, or the question whether Mill was
strictly speaking utilitarian. Here it suffices to defend the claim that James was not a
utilitarian.
33. See, e.g., Dewey, Ethics, in Middle Works, 5:122–123.

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calls the psychological question is an inquiry into the origins of our valuing,
while the casuistic question deals with evaluation. Although James grants that
many of our valuings have arisen in direct association with bodily pleasures
and reliefs from bodily pains and that others result from the influence of pub-
lic opinion, he insists both in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” and
more emphatically in the last chapter of the Principles that we have what he
calls there a “higher moral sensibility.” This makes us feel immediately how
hideous it would be to achieve the felicity of millions at the expense of the
unending torture of one lost soul; it explains the feelings that cause many of to
eschew the eating of meat, etc. James’s consequentialism thus includes already
among the consequences to be counted any moral goods that one might fear
would be endangered by consequentialism. Whether James can defend him-
self against the objection by Philippa Foot is less clear.
Concerning utilitarianism Foot says, “There will in fact be nothing that it
will not be right to do to a perfectly innocent individual if that is the only
way of preventing another agent from doing more things of the same kind.”34
Presumably, compassion would prevent many from committing such ac-
tions, and James regards compassion as one of the basic emotions without
which morality cannot gain a foothold. (In his notes for lectures on ethics he
asks himself repeatedly whether one could persuade a person who lacks the
altruistic impulse to act morally.)35 However, even if justice is, as James
maintains, a value of which we are immediately sensible, it is not clear that
the Jamesian agent must refuse to do an injustice to one even when that
means letting others do an injustice to many. Saying that one would feel
immediately how hideous it would be deliberately to purchase the happiness
of millions at the cost of one soul’s eternal suffering does not commit James
to rejecting that bargain after reflection or, needless to say, to accepting it.
There are perhaps more moral dilemmas in James’s moral world than in
Foot’s, and that may be all to the good. A theory that claims to resolve all
moral dilemmas may fail to do justice to the complexity of our moral lives.
However, opening the doors so widely to our moral intuitions will compli-
cate the casuistic question, the question of evaluation, of establishing “the
measure of the various goods and ills which men recognize.”36
34. Philippa Foot, “Utilitarianism and the Virtues,” Mind 94 (1985): 196–209, 198.
35. For example, James, Manuscripts, Essays and Notes, in Works, 17: 303.

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The moral philosopher is to weave the ideals she finds in the world into
the unity of a stable system without giving any special weight to any ideals
of her own except for this ideal of coherence. This turns out to be an impos-
sible task. Since the “elementary forces in ethics are probably as plural as
those of physics are,” which rules out any form of reductionism, and since
all ideals cannot be satisfied simultaneously, the moral philosopher must
ultimately appeal to her own moral sensibilities. That idea fills James with
horror. “Better chaos forever than an order based on any closet-philosopher’s
rule, even though he were the most enlightened member of the tribe.”37 But
James is not prepared to fall back on moral skepticism. Rather, what this
attempt at an a priori ethics has taught him is that “so far as the casuistic
question goes, ethical science is just like physical science, and instead of be-
ing deducible all at once from abstract principles, must simply bide its time,
and be ready to revise its conclusions from day to day.” What James is pre-
pared to offer his readers is not a system but rather a criterion.
Since everything which is demanded is by that fact a good, must not the
guiding principle for ethical philosophy (since all the demands conjointly
cannot be satisfied in this poor world) be simply to satisfy at all times as many
demands as we can? That act must be the best, accordingly, which makes for
the best whole, in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions. In
the casuistic scale, therefore, those ideals must be written highest which pre-
vail at the least cost or by whose realization the least possible number of other
ideals are destroyed.38
Unfortunately, this passage raises the suspicion that James is simply in-
consistent. I shall argue that he is not. The suspicion arises as follows. If the
guiding principle for ethical philosophy is
1. That act is best that awakens the least sum of dissatisfactions, then
James appears after all to be an act-utilitarian, though not a hedonis-
tic one, since, as mentioned above, he denies that all demands are
reducible to desires for physical pleasure and aversion to physical
pain. But this “guiding principle” is glossed as follows:
37. Ibid, 155.


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2. Those ideals must be written highest by whose realization the least

number of other ideals are destroyed.
Though (2) is vague—how would one count ideals?—it coheres far better
than (1) with the account I have given of James’s views. This results in the
following reading of the troubling passage.
James does not intend us to take all existing desires as they happen to be
and to seek what will satisfy the greatest number of them. Rather, we are to
pursue those ideals that can be realized at the least cost to other ideals. If not
every object of desire is an ideal but only those that shape desires, or at any
rate significant parts thereof, then large numbers of more or less temporary
desires may well be sacrificed for the realization of an ideal. That, it seems to
me, is an accurate description of how we actually manage to lead reasonably
contented, reasonably coherent lives. Again and again we sacrifice small de-
sires to long-range projects. Why should we not apply to the public domain
what stands us in good stead in our private lives? If this is right, “the best act”
is the act that fits into the most inclusive ideal and that, of all acts that so fit,
awakens the least sum of dissatisfactions.
However, we are not yet home free. What is inclusiveness when it comes
to ideals? There are several possibilities. An ideal may be more inclusive than
another because it is espoused by a greater number of persons, because it
benefits more people, or because it encompasses a greater number of lesser
ideals, perhaps as the result of a process of compromise and accommodation.
Thus we might say that the ideal of freedom of conscience is more inclusive
than the ideal of toleration for Christian sects only, since it benefits more
people; we might also say that the ideal of respect is more inclusive than the
ideal of mere tolerance, since it includes the latter. However, though realiza-
tion of freedom of conscience would have benefited the greater number of
persons at all times, this ideal was espoused for most of human history only
by a small number. Moreover, the question of benefit depends, at least some-
times, on what people demand. Religious fundamentalists believe that free-
dom of conscience threatens the very values that it leaves them free to pursue
in a pluralist society. Were they the majority, they would attempt to impose
their faith on everyone and consider themselves and us the beneficiaries.
Nevertheless, religious freedom is the more inclusive ideal, since it permits
the greater part of the fundamentalists’ ideals as well as the realization of the
greater part of the ideals of those of other persuasions.

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We seem to have reached an impasse. What is seen as the more inclusive

ideal in the eyes of someone committed to what James refers to approvingly as
“our ancient national doctrine of live and let live” would be rejected by some,
perhaps many, of its beneficiaries.39 That would be an impasse if they too were
committed to finding and promoting the most inclusive ideal, but they are
not. What this difficulty shows is rather that in advocating the most inclusive
ideal, James the philosopher has in fact imported an ideal of his own. It seems
to be indeed impossible to proceed with moral philosophy unless one brings
to the task ideals of one’s own. It is not only the case, as James acknowledges,
that the moral philosopher is “no better able to determine the best universe in
the concrete emergency than other men,” that she is “just like the rest of us
non-philosophers, so far as we are just and sympathetic instinctively, and so far
as we are open to the voice of complaint.” If her function is, as he says, “indis-
tinguishable from the best kind of statesman,” she cannot be an impartial ju-
dicial investigator but must be an advocate.40 There are those who find it a
tragedy that there is no transcendental perspective from which one can
demonstrate the superiority of the values of the Enlightenment. I do not agree
with that judgment. The values of the Enlightenment are indeed worth pre-
serving and propagating, and a pragmatist ethics seems to me to be both an
expression of those values and a brilliant example of how these values may be
incorporated into a comprehensive moral philosophy.
There is another interpretation of “more inclusive.” An ideal may be said
to be more inclusive than another if the included ideal was taken into ac-
count in the argument or conversation that terminated in the adoption of
the more inclusive ideal.41 The argument or conversation would, of course,
have to be fair in some sense to be specified. One might think, for example,
of the conversation in a Rawlsian original position. Indeed, the Rawlsian
principles of justice, in particular the difference principle, may then be seen
as including the ideal of absolute socioeconomic equality, since that ideal
was taken as the starting point for the conversation.42 On this reading, an
ideal adopted after free and equal parties reached consensus in a nonthreat-
39. James, Talks to Teachers, in Works, 10:5.

40. James, The Will to Believe, in Works, 6:158–159.
41. This suggestion is due to Ken Winkler.
1971).

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ening, noncoercive setting would include those ideals that were modified or
even abandoned during the discussion. That such consensus can be reached
on issues of vital importance—avoiding nuclear war, preserving the bio-
sphere, raising the standard of living in the have-not nations—is indeed our
last, best hope, but the rules governing this type of discussion reflect once
again respect for the dignity of the participants.
Respect for the dignity of the individual and the freedoms and equalities
that such respect implies cannot be grounded in a deeper foundation. We
can only exhibit their glory. That is why James is right to tell us that “books
upon ethics, therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more
and more ally themselves with a literature that is confessedly tentative and
suggestive rather than dogmatic—I mean with novels and dramas of the
deeper sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and social and economic
reform.”43 To be sure, James was moved to this declaration not by appre-
hending that the ideal of an inclusive ideal is itself not morally neutral but
rather by a lively appreciation of the fallibility of all philosophers. “Like the
rest of us non-philosophers,” the philosopher “cannot know for certain in
advance” which is the most inclusive ideal.
For James, moral progress occurs when more and more human beings in
their demands and in their actions realize ideals that encompass greater and
greater numbers of lesser ideals. That presupposes that one knows what
those ideals are. That is why one must begin with the ideals one finds exist-
ing in one’s society, but it is also why that can only be a starting point. One’s
problem is set precisely because one is confronted with a clash of values, a
conflict of demands, incompatible standards. The task of finding more in-
clusive ideals is, therefore, truly formidable. One is tempted to fall back on
the wisdom of mankind, which in practice means endorsing the scale of the
narrower society to which one happens to belong. This temptation is further
encouraged by the fact James believed, as we perhaps do not, that mankind
has made, was making, and would continue to make moral progress. He was
“confident that the line of least resistance will always be towards the richer
and the more inclusive arrangement, and that by one tack after another
some approach to the kingdom of heaven is incessantly made.”44 To the ex-

44. Ibid., 157.

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tent that the present ideals clash with earlier ones, it would then appear that
the earlier ones gave way to the later ones because they could not be accom-
modated in a coherent comprehensive scheme. Nevertheless, may there not
be ideals espoused by our predecessors that might offer solutions to some of
our pressing contemporary ills? Should we not, in the interests of both ob-
jectivity and further moral progress, reconsider all past ideals? That would
appear to be a waste of effort. Surely, the result of humanity’s experiments
with slavery are sufficiently clear that we need no longer ask what is wrong
with it. Nevertheless, as philosophers we must resist the temptation to be
blind partisans of the present. On the one hand, any past ideal that has con-
temporary champions (e.g., the communitarian ideal) must be reconsidered,
even if the reconsideration serves only to remind us why we rejected it be-
fore. On the other hand, though the presumption both in science and in
morality is in favor of the accepted opinion, progress in both is due to those
courageous individuals who “may replace old ‘laws of nature’ by better ones
[or,] by breaking old moral rules in a certain place, bring in a total condition
of things more ideal than could have been followed had the rules been
kept.”45 James mentions Tolstoy’s ideal of nonviolent resistance; we may
think of Martin Luther King Jr. as an American who broke the old rules to
bring about more ideal conditions. Here it is worth recalling that the revo-
lutionary must choose “with fear and trembling” and be prepared “to stake
his life and character upon the throw.” James does not encourage utopia-
nism. Indeed, he regards it as contemptible.
We have come full circle. Moral life consists of normal stretches punctuated
by critical moments. During the normal stretches our conduct is shaped by
our virtues and vices and directed by our ideals. Our problems consist on the
one hand in resisting temptation and on the other in finding the best means
to our ends. During the critical moments we choose new ideals or reaffirm
or modify old ones guided by nothing but ourselves. Our character limits
our choices and will be modified by the choices we make. The right act is the
45. Ibid., 157–158.

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act that fits into a certain life, fits the character one is and wants to become.
The right act is also the act that fits into the most inclusive ideal. These are
not incompatible characterizations, for the character and the ideal are not
independent. Together they constitute the agent, the person, who she is. To
be sure, another person may judge that a certain action, though it fits into
the agent’s most inclusive ideal, fails to fit into the most inclusive ideal of the
relevant community. A theory of the moral life that denied the possibility of
conflict between an individual and her society would not be true to the facts.
It would also fail to do justice to James, who was fully aware of the need for
social criticism and reform. But with this acknowledgment I must drop this
matter here.
These criteria of fitting (into a life, with a character, into an ideal) sound
less consequentialist than James’s concern with the most inclusive ideal
would suggest. In practice, however, they are often the only criteria available
at a moment of critical choice, for often the consequences cannot be known.
That makes the choice one to be undertaken with fear and trembling.
However, having chosen, having acted, we must listen for the cries of the
wounded, who would inform us if we have made a bad mistake and would
motivate us to begin anew.
Having dealt at length with the casuistic question as well as, though more
briefly, with the psychological one, I want to return in conclusion to the is-
sue of objectivity, James’s metaphysical question. For James, values exist only
in so far as they are so experienced. That, however, does not yet provide for
objectivity. For “truth,” he writes, “supposes a standard outside the thinker
to which he must conform.”46 That standard is provided by a community of
thinkers who make demands upon one another and acknowledge these de-
mands. In practice we learn that our moral judgments have been mistaken
when those we have wounded respond to our actions with cries of pain and
indignation. Our capacity to care for one another lies at the very foundation
of the objectivity of moral judgments. But it is entirely compatible with this
approach that different cultures, different traditions, should forever believe
in and attempt to realize different ideals. James’s account is, to say the least,
too sketchy to provide a clear response to the charge of cultural relativism.
Such a response would begin by saying that James’s fallibilism with respect
46. Ibid., 146.

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to ideals means simply that the final inclusive ideal will leave room for many
ways of life that will share a commitment to pluralism. James’s moral philos-
ophy calls for a sympathetic reader to interpret, interpolate, and smooth
over what appear to be contradictions. I have only begun to do that here.
Nevertheless, I hope to have shown that a pragmatic ethics has more to offer
than has been acknowledged by most contemporary moral philosophers.
Note
An earlier draft of this essay was presented to the Philosophy Club at the
University of Virginia. I benefited from the discussion that followed, espe-
cially from remarks by Cora Diamond and a student whose name I do not
know. I was also helped by conversation with Owen Flanagan and Amélie
Rorty. The penultimate draft of this essay was read with great care by Ken
Winkler, whose comments prevented me from making at least one serious
blunder and enabled me to be clearer than I otherwise would have been. To
all these people I am most grateful.

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24
Creating Facts and Values
Ruth Anna Putnam
MORAL SKEPTICS maintain that there are no objective moral values, or that
there is no moral knowledge, or no moral facts, or that what looks like a
statement which makes a moral judgment is not really a statement and does
not have a truth-value. All of this is rather unclear because all of it is nega-
tive. It will be necessary to remove some of this unclarity because my aim in
this essay is to establish a proposition which may be summarized by saying
even if there are no objective moral values in one sense, there are objective
moral values in another sense, and the latter values are good enough to do
some of the jobs that objective values in the first sense would have done. A
useful analogy might be that of a person who has lost her hand and has been
given a prosthesis. In one sense the prosthesis is not as real (because man-
made) as the hand; in another sense it is just as real (both are physical ob-
jects); most importantly, the person can do with the prosthesis enough of
what she could do with the hand to make do.
Ordinary men and women have no trouble distinguishing between real

things and happenings on the one hand and figments of the imagination
and made-up stories on the other. Roughly speaking, the former are what
they are regardless of what we believe them to be or would like them to be;
changing real things takes real effort and is possible to only a limited extent.

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In contrast, stories which we make up and characters which we invent are

what we want them to be and can be changed at will. Take as an example of
a hard fact that right now (in winter) there are no leaves on the tree outside
my window. I can imagine what the tree will be like in spring and I long
passionately for spring; but neither my imagining nor my longing will put a
single leaf on the tree. Ordinary men and women used to believe that there
are moral facts that are just as hard as the bareness of the tree; even a sincere
belief that the gods demand it does not make human sacrifice right, they
claimed. Moral laws, they said, are as immune to change by mere human
willing as are the laws of planetary motion. Many ordinary men and women
still hold these beliefs, but for many others moral skepticism, unlike skepti-
cism with respect to the external world, has become part of the intellectual
baggage that they carry into everyday life.
Let us, however, ignore for a while the possibility of moral skepticism.
Not all facts are as hard as the bareness of trees or the wrongness of child
sacrifice. Is it really an objective fact that rhesus monkeys are small? Is not
the fact rather that rhesus monkeys are small monkeys? Smallness, on re-
flection, turns out to be a relative rather than an absolute property, and
facts involving smallness turn out to be rather more complex than one
might have thought at first blush; still, these more complex facts are as
objective as the bareness of the tree. Similarly, not everything which looks
at first blush like a moral fact turns out to be a moral fact. That Susan
ought to uphold the Constitution of the United States turns out to be a
legal fact. The more complex moral fact is this: having been elected to
public office in the United States and having taken an oath of office in-
volving the promise to uphold the Constitution of the United States,
Susan ought to uphold the Constitution. I mention these matters only to
put them aside. Refinements are called for if one wants to develop defen-
sible realist positions. Since I do not intend to defend a realist position, I
need not go further.
So far I have contrasted the objectivity of real happenings with the sub-
jectivity of made-up stories, and I have pointed out that there are types of
relativity which do not undermine objectivity. Moral skeptics will agree with
all of this. Moreover, their philosophical accounts and explanations of these
matters will differ just as do those of other philosophers. But philosophers
who are moral skeptics, and many ordinary men and women as well, want
to contrast also the objectivity of scientific facts with the subjectivity of

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CR E AT I NG FAC TS A ND VA LU E S 387
moral facts, or, to put this another way, they want to say that there are scien-
tific facts but there are no moral facts.
Ordinary men and women who are not moral skeptics are prepared to
contrast the goodness of, say, honesty with the goodness of vanilla ice-cream.
Honesty, they believe, is good whether or not we find it easy or prudent to
be honest and even if the duty to be honest conflicts at times with other
moral duties. In contrast, the goodness of vanilla ice-cream is simply a mat-
ter of people’s liking for vanilla ice-cream. The utter subjectivity of the good-
ness of vanilla ice-cream is to be contrasted with the objectivity of the but-
terfat content of a certain brand of vanilla ice-cream (which may be a
measure of ‘goodness’ relative to officially adopted standards), and with the
question whether vanilla ice-cream is ‘good for’ a certain person (does it
satisfy her nutritional needs or does it provoke an allergic reaction?), which
is also objective. Finally, it may be worthwhile to point to one more way in
which ordinary people show that they take the goodness of vanilla ice-cream
to be subjective: they are not the least bit disturbed if other people do not
share their liking for vanilla ice-cream.
Moral skeptics deny the contrast just described between the objective
moral goodness of honesty and the subjective goodness of vanilla ice-
cream. They hold that all moral goodness is ultimately subjective. Although
some goodness, perhaps even some moral goodness, may be objective rel-
ative to standards, functions, purposes, such relative objectivity, they say,
simply postpones our confronting the ultimate subjectivity of all moral
values. There are considerable differences in what are cited as reasons for
moral skepticism: the arguments from cultural relativism, from ‘queer-
ness’, from moral disagreements, etc. There are even disagreements on how
to formulate the position: old-fashioned emotivists say that ‘there are
moral values’ is metaphysical nonsense as is any expression which asserts
the intrinsic goodness of anything; metaphysical moral skeptics say, in-
stead, that all such expressions are false. These differences do not interest
me; for all versions of moral skepticism based on whatever grounds cause
anguish if taken seriously. It is, however, important to emphasize that
when moral skeptics say that there are no objective moral values (or that
all moral judgments are meaningless) they deny in the first instance that
there are any absolute moral values. Nothing simply ought to exist (whether
any human being has an interest in its existence or not) so that any action
which brings it about or preserves it would be justified in so far as it does

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just that. No action is simply obligatory apart from any human institution
or practice of which it is a part.
The view that there are no objective moral values, that it is all a ‘matter of
opinion’ has found its way into the popular culture. Our children bring it
home from their secondary schools, our students challenge us with it in
moral philosophy classes. In its popular version it is, I believe, a genuine
skepticism: what is taken to be the certainty of scientific knowledge (a cer-
tainty which nonscientists tend to exaggerate) is contrasted with the uncer-
tainty of moral beliefs (as evidenced by the prevalence of seemingly unre-
solvable moral disagreements).
In common with some other contemporary philosophers, primarily phi-
losophers in the United States, I believe that the popular view to which I just
alluded, and the view of the philosophers from which it derives, is mistaken;
but I shall not attempt to criticize the view in this essay. Instead I want to
suggest why the view is found troubling. If there were objective moral val-
ues, they would provide us with justifications for action; we could say, “I did
that because it was my duty.” But if there are no objective moral values, or if
moral values cannot be known, then there are ultimately no justifications for
actions; the responsibility is all ours. A governor might, to be sure, justify his
refusal to commute a death sentence by claiming that he merely upheld the
constitution of his state and thus obeyed his oath of office; but that will not
satisfy any firm opponent of the death penalty, and one wonders how much
comfort the governor derives from that reflection when he contemplates the
possibility that the condemned man may have been innocent.
Needless to say, I am not suggesting that in the absence of absolute moral
values we do not act; for there are sufficient causes for action ranging from
mere whims to dire needs. Indeed, I shall argue presently that out of some
needs justifications for action may be fashioned; but whether that is so or not,
we long for moral values. I suspect that this longing itself has multiple causes.
Sometimes we want to give others reasons for acting in a certain way, but we
do not want to coerce them. Sometimes we want to justify an action of our
own but do not want to claim that we were simply helpless cogs in a causal
machine. Sometimes we want to explain a persistent moral disagreement by

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charging our opponents with moral blindness or moral idiocy. Fascinating as

an inquiry into the multiple causes of our longing for moral values would be,
it would lead us too far afield to pursue it here. My aim in this essay is simply
to show that even if there are not objective moral values in the sense explained
(i.e., even if states of affairs are not morally good or bad, nor actions morally
obligatory, permitted, or forbidden, independently of some human willing),
there are sufficient constraints on human willing to produce values that are
objective enough to take the place of the values we have ‘lost’.
People used to think that justifications for action were supplied by values
which exist independently of human needs and interests, just as (according
to the prevalent popular view) bodies exist independently of human aware-
ness of them, and that these values could be known by us. Until the
Enlightenment almost everyone thought that these values were either cre-
ated by God (or the gods) or at any rate known by Him (or them). God gave
us laws and thereby provided us with the stable foundation on which we
could erect the detailed moral-legal-political structures which enable us in
our varying circumstances (hence varying structures) to live together, to co-
operate, to be (relatively) secure, and, when things go well, to flourish. Even
without God nothing would have changed if what Alasdair Macintyre calls
the “project of the Enlightenment,” namely, “the project of an independent
rational justification of morality,” had succeeded.1 But many people believe
that the project has clearly failed and only some of these are able to return to
a purely religious basis for morality. For the rest of us there seems to remain
nothing but moral skepticism and anguish.
We still need stable moral-legal-political structures to regulate our con-
duct and make life livable. These moral-legal-political structures still need
secure foundations. In short, we still need moral values. Now, when people
need something which nature (deus sive) fails to provide, then people sooner
or later, more or less successfully, invent or create what will supply that need.
Thus people create tools and machines, cultivate food plants, and domesti-
cate animals. No one is troubled concerning the ontological status of these
things; they are just as real as the materials out of which they are fashioned
or as their naturally evolved forebears and prototypes. Nor do we think that
these things are in any sense ‘arbitrary’; they are what they are precisely be-
1. Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981), 38.

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cause they were created in response to a human need, that human need
constrains what they are, they are better or worse precisely to the extent that
they satisfy that human need and do not as a ‘side effect’ thwart other im-
portant human needs.
But when it is said that since there is no God and there are no preexisting
values, we create values, the result is anguish. I know of no philosopher who
has emphasized more clearly than Sartre both that we cannot escape creating
values (we do so whenever we choose to act, and even when we choose not
to act) and that this fact causes anguish. We experience anguish because
self-created values do not provide a firm basis for a common morality; we
experience anguish because values which exist only after the fact of choosing
make choosing arbitrary. Here I am interested in Sartre’s response to that last
complaint.
Having pointed out that choosing takes place in a situation in which the
chooser is involved, and that one’s choice involves all mankind, Sartre con-
tinues, “Doubtless he chooses without reference to pre-established values,
but it is unfair to accuse him of caprice. Instead, let us say that moral choice
is to be compared to the making of a work of art.”2
I shall wish to return to this suggestion of Sartre’s below; it seems to me
to be extraordinarily helpful to compare the creation of moral values with
the creation of the artist and even more so the artisan.
But first I wish to look at another case for human creativity, namely the
creation of facts as described by Nelson Goodman in Ways of Worldmaking.3
My intention in drawing your attention to fact-making is not to cause you
to become skeptics about facts as well as about values; on the contrary, the
point is to say that since we get along well enough with facts although they
are made-by-us, we should entertain the suggestion that we can get along
well enough with made-by-us moral values. We must, of course, ask what
prevents facts made by us from being arbitrary and whether similar con-
straints are present in the case of value-making. This is where the analogy
with the work of artists and of artisans will prove helpful.
2. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme. I quote from Bernard

Frechtman’s translation in Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism, ed. Wade Baskin
(New York: Citadel Press, 1965), 55.
3. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978).

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Goodman points out that “we must distinguish falsehood and fiction from
truth and facts, but we cannot, I am sure, do it on the ground that fiction is
fabricated and fact found.”4 What then are facts? Facts are, in the first in-
stance, facts about objects, about trees and leaves and monkeys and even
those complicated objects, human beings. I do not wish to raise any doubts
concerning the existence of the ‘external world’ or ‘other minds’, nor do I
wish to worry about ‘mind-body interactions’; but with Goodman, and in a
tradition which goes back at least to Kant, I wish to cast doubt on the notion
of facts independent of us.
There is a familiar distinction between facts and theories. I do not know
whether any one still holds that there is a hard and fast dichotomy; perhaps
everyone will agree that the boundaries are fuzzy. The main point is that,
according to the common view, facts can be verified here and now, or with
very little effort. Facts are the way things are, the way things (or events) hap-
pen; theories explain why things are the way they are, why events happen the
way they happen; in short, theories explain facts. Even if Goodman were
wrong and facts were to be found, theories do not lie about, theories are not
found. Theories are inferred by what Peirce called abduction. Abduction
involves the inventing of a theory which, if it were true, would make it a
matter of course that the facts to be explained are what they are, happen as
they happen. Thus the human element in the ‘discovery’ of theories is obvi-
ous; theories are indeed invented or created. Theories are not mere summa-
ries of old facts nor mere projections of such summaries on the future.
Theories are at the very least new ways of looking at old facts.
In his discussion of creativity among scientists, Arieti emphasizes the im-
portance of seeing both similarities that others had not seen and seeing dif-
ferences among the things that are so newly identified.5 Because theories are
new ways of looking at old facts (and that may be very much more complex
than noticing similarities and differences that others had not noticed), theo-
ries could never be wholly verified nor wholly falsified by the facts even if
facts were entirely stolid. If I ask a child to sort pieces of cardboard in various
4. Ibid., 91.
5. Silvano Arieti, Creativity (New York: Basic Books, 1976), chap. 11.

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primary colors and various simple shapes by color, then there is a clear answer
to the question whether the child has done it ‘right’. But if I ask the child
merely to ‘sort’ the pieces, then there are many right ways of accomplishing
the task, and we can perhaps never be quite sure that the child has done it
‘wrong’ or misunderstood the instructions. Still, some ways of sorting will be
accepted by us immediately; they fit our notion of ‘sorts’ (color, shape, size,
texture), and others we may accept if the child can give a reason (red and
yellow pieces go together because these are warm colors, blue pieces are sep-
arate because they are cold). Some sortings will be so bizarre from our point
of view and so inexplicable by the child that we are going to regard them as
‘wrong’. And if the colored cardboard pieces come in various shades rather
than just the primary colors, there may even be sortings by color, of which we
are at a loss to say whether they are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.
Although I presented the child’s sorting as analogous to theory
construction because in its open-endedness it is indeed an example of allow-
ing for new ways of looking at old facts, it is perhaps better to consider it as
an example of fact-making. For theories are supposed to explain facts, but
here there appear to be no facts to be explained. Instead, by its sorting, the
child ‘creates’ facts of sameness.
I am tempted to spend more time on theory-construction, for this is one
of the exciting ways in which human beings are creative. Theory-creation is
appreciated as being crucial to human progress; scientifically creative indi-
viduals are seen as assets to modern society, and considerable research has
been devoted to finding out the conditions for creative flourishing of the
scientific kind. But what is relevant now is only that once again the specter
of arbitrariness and subjectivity threatens to haunt us. Theories, because they
are human creations, need warrant; only theories which can be warranted by
facts are scientific theories. However, we just received our first hint that facts
too might be created by us.
It is helpful to think of scientific theories as analogous to moral-legal-
political systems. The latter enable us to find our way in the confusing
tangle of human relationships; the former enable us to find our way in, to
explain and predict, the confusing tangle that is nature (including human
nature). We noted that moral-legalpolitical systems stand in need of war-
rant (moral justification); we said that they would be warranted if there
were moral values. We observed that if there are no ready-made values, we
shall have to create them; and we ended by noting that people do not find

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created-by-us values sufficiently reassuring. Now, similarly, theories are

found to stand in need of warrant (epistemological justification); we need
to distinguish science from magic, we say, or science from superstition, or
science from metaphysics, or, less arrogantly, true theories from false ones.
In practice, we are happy if our theories are relatively well confirmed. Now
to warrant or confirm theories we need facts. But my example of the child
sorting colored cardboard pieces, what we all know about the relativity of
motion, Kolers’s experiments concerning the perception of apparent mo-
tion (see below), and many other examples make it abundantly clear that
“Facts are small theories, and true theories are big facts.”6 We may say, in
analogy with what we said earlier about values, if there are no ready-made
facts, we shall have to create them. But we saw earlier that people hold that
if we create values, then (in some sense) there are no values. Must we now
say that there are no facts?
Although the last is a view which has been ably defended by some philos-
ophers, it has surely now been overstated. Even a careful reader of Goodman’s
Ways of Worldmaking may want to say that the world, or version, of everyday
objects with its familiar sortings, its comfortable sizes, and its not-too-star-
tling expenditures of energy, is the world of facts. It is what our children and
their teachers and all of us in our nonprofessional moments take to be the
world of facts. Beyond this world, to be sure, there are the wonderful worlds
of scientific theories, there are (or better: there are not, but there are thought
by some to be) the mysterious worlds of magic, there are (but only in a
Pickwickian sense) the worlds of fiction, and there are, finally, the various
worlds of various artists. But, alas, the familiar world of facts is simply the
world of a very familiar version. It is the world of a theory so old, so en-
trenched, so successful that it is for us the world that is ‘there’, that needs
explaining (but not warranting) and becomes modified as it is explained and
better understood. We might put this yet another way and say that facts are
how we organize the “blooming buzzing confusion” of sensory inputs, of
‘surface irritations’.7 Clearly, then, some facts will be quotidian while others
will be esoteric, and most will lie in between; but even the most solid has
been made by some human being.
6. Goodman, Ways, 97.


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How then can we draw a line between fact and fiction, between right
versions and wrong ones? What troubles us in the suggestion that facts are
not found but fabricated is this: Goodman reminds us of the experiments
by Kolers in which subjects see flashes of light at such short intervals and
in such close spatial proximity that they report seeing one moving light.
Now, given what we have learned from the physicists, we describe this by
saying that the psychologist performs experiments concerning apparent
motion. Clearly, to speak this way is to express a preference for the physi-
cists’ version. It would be better to say with Goodman that there is a phys-
icists’ version and a perceptual version of what happens. But apparently
some subjects have internalized the physicists’ version to such an extent
that they are unable to ‘see’ the moving dot of light; they always see dis-
tinct flashes. There is a drawing in N. R. Hanson’s Patterns of Discovery
which can be seen as either an old woman or a young one.8 I have never
been able to see the young one. What troubles us about the subjects who
fail to report that they see a moving spot of light, and what troubles me
about myself when I fail to see the young woman, is that our reports fail
to fit into a certain larger story. We do not (the subjects and I) lie, of
course, but our inability to see what is in some sense ‘there’ calls for an
explanation just as much as the blind man’s inability to see any spot of
light at all. He is blind, the subjects who fail to respond as expected either
misunderstand the instructions or . . . And I? What makes a certain report
right or wrong in these cases is that it fits, or does not fit, into a suitable
larger story. Every experimenter when he turns to construct a theory to fit
his data discards some of the latter as erroneous; often he can identify a
cause (or a likely cause) of the error, but there are times when data are re-
jected simply because they do not fit. And this is the point at which we
become uneasy. At which point does this sort of thing turn into ‘the theory
justifies the data’, thereby undermining the very integrity of science? At
what point do the facts which are to be the foundation of science turn into
fictions?
There is a persistent nagging conviction that after all anything we make is,
just because we make it, arbitrary. Knowledge and morality without foundation
8. N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1972).

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give us a sense of vertigo. It does not help, rather it increases the sense of vertigo,
when Goodman says that “the arts must be taken no less seriously than the
sciences as modes of discovery, creation, and enlargement of knowledge in the
broad sense of advancement of the understanding,” for that seems to say that
there are even more possible versions (or worlds) than we had thought.9
I now wish to suggest, returning to Sartre’s point mentioned so long ago,

that a clearer appreciation of artistic creation will dispel the vertigo which
the very idea of creating facts and moral values induces. While we say, rather
too often, that there is no accounting for or disputing about taste in the arts,
our behavior shows that we do not believe this. We offer courses in art ap-
preciation and music appreciation and in literature. We believe that taste can
be cultivated. All this suggests that our judgments about works of art can be
more or less ‘right’, and that, in turn, suggests that the work itself can be
more or less ‘right’. I cannot ask here whether that rightness is always or ever
the same thing as beauty. I shall assume merely that without rightness there
is no (significant) beauty, and I shall assume that rightness has to do with
fitting certain constraints.
What then constrains the artist; what is involved in the artist’s getting things
right? Let us first consider an artisan. The artisan wants to fashion a spoon, say.
The needs to which spoons answer provide the constraints on the spoon-maker.
The material must be strong enough to hold the food. It must not be too heavy,
and it must be either carvable or malleable or moldable. While spoons come in
various sizes, spoons for eating soup or mush must not be larger than the hu-
man mouth nor so small that too much energy and time is expended in moving
the food from plate to mouth with their aid. While the handle of the spoon
may be decorated to delight the eye, it must not be so decorated as to make it
awkward or painful to hold, etc. The bowl of the spoon should not have sharp
corners that might hurt the mouth, but not all smooth forms will be found
acceptable. Tradition favors the oval, although round spoon-bowls are some-
times found. Two things stand out: (1) the need to which the creation responds
9. Goodman, Ways, 102.

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provides most of the limits. The shape, etc., of a spoon is not arbitrary precisely
because spoons are created to answer a need. Why then should facts or values
be suspect because they are created in response to a need? (2) Additional limits
are provided by tradition on the one hand, by what has been done, and by some
sense of style on the other, by what is done. In Asia spoons are often made of
china; in the United States they are almost always made of metal. These tradi-
tions themselves have their roots in what materials were available and what
techniques were known. Finally, although styles vary, styles set limits to sport-
ing, and hence to what is acceptable by way of originality.
When we turn to art in the ‘high’ sense, we discover that here too there
are constraints which artists learn as they go through what is essentially an
apprenticeship. Roy Harris, in speaking of the creative musician, mentions
that he must learn a musical language which consists of traditional symbols,
“yet in each generation the composer is driven from within by his own ideas
and from without by the dictates of his inarticulate social environment to
formulate new idioms of expression which modify tradition and add to it.”10
Harris sees the musician as intensifying, reaffirming, releasing, and translat-
ing universal human emotions into the “idioms of culture.” In 1942 Rhys
Carpenter traced the development of technique in painting as a develop-
ment spurred on by the need to represent nature. Yet he stressed the impor-
tance of style; “style must be a living thing . . . [so that] no style has any
strength or any hold unless it seems to the artist his own attainment, suscep-
tible to growth and change through his own use of it.”11 Both Harris and
Carpenter emphasize the importance of autonomous creation within limits;
works of art are neither readymade nor arbitrary sporting. Here I am inter-
ested in the latter aspect. What keeps the work of art—any art—from being
arbitrary, it seems, is just what keeps the work of the artisan from being ar-
bitrary: the boundaries set by the needs to which the work responds, the
techniques and materials which are available, what may broadly be called
style, and some sort of fitting into the larger culture. How then does it stand
with facts and with values?
10. Roy Harris, “The Basis of Artistic Creation in Music,” in The Bases of Artistic
Creation, ed. Maxwell Anderson, Rhys Carpenter, and Roy Harris (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1942), 27.
11. Rhys Carpenter, “The Basis of Artistic Creation in Painting,” in The Bases of
Artistic Creation, 58.

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Let us begin with facts. Facts, we said, are created because we need warrant
for our theories. Theories are created because we need to explain facts. Facts
and theories are created because we need to find our way about in nature.
William James reminds us that “we live in a world of realities that can be
infinitely useful or infinitely harmful. Ideas that tell us which of them to
expect count as true ideas.”12 James’s true ideas are my facts, and like the
works of artists, these facts are constrained by the materials out of which
they are fashioned, by the techniques of fact-making already available, and
by the needs that give rise to them. I do not wish to force the analogy. Let
me say simply that (1) we are constrained by the actual sensory inputs we
receive; (2) we are constrained by what we have made of our sensory inputs
in the past, the conceptual framework embodied in our prior beliefs, what
we have taken to be facts so far; and (3) we are constrained by the insistent
demand for coherence and consistency. In speaking of sensory inputs I have,
of course, already engaged in worldmaking; the facts of worldmaking are
themselves made. Goodman says that “things and worlds and even the stuff
they are made of—matter, antimatter, mind, energy, or whatnot—are fash-
ioned along with the things and worlds themselves,” and concerning the
second constraint he reminds us, “Some of the felt stubbornness of fact is
the grip of habit: our firm foundation is indeed stolid.”13 The third con-
straint has to do with the limits to our creativity, limits which point in op-
posite directions. On the one hand, we must be selective. We must impose
an order that eliminates from consideration much of what is there and ar-
ranges what is left so that it clearly answers to the need or interest that sent
us off making new facts in the first place. On the other hand, as Erich
Fromm points out, creativity consists in “seeing and responding” as opposed
to cognizing and verbalizing.14 The kind of seeing Fromm has in mind con-
sists in becoming aware of what has been excluded from notice by the cur-
rent version, of what, in a sense, does not exist in the current world. I heard
a social worker say once that alcoholism does not exist in a community until

13. Goodman, Ways, 96, 97.
14. Erich Fromm, “The Creative Attitude,” in Creativity and Its Cultivation, ed.
Harold H. Anderson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959).

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it is seen to be a problem; children see beautiful flowers where adults see only
weeds. Fromm points out that children and creative scientists share “the ca-
pacity to be puzzled” which is “the premise of all creation, be it in art or in
science.”15
Noting limits on the creation of facts points in opposite directions be-
cause the need that prompts us to create directs our attention to certain
features of the world and away from others. Faced with a problem, the first
‘sorting’ is a sorting into aids, obstacles, and irrelevancies, and what is irrel-
evant is thereafter ignored. But often what has been thus discarded turns out
to be precisely the needed resource. Children are more observant, more of-
ten puzzled, and to that extent more creative than adults in part because they
do not look at the world in terms of a finished and familiar version and
partly because often they do not look at the world through the spectacles of
a problem. The worlds of children have not yet been sorted into resource,
obstacle, and irrelevancy.
I have not, in what I have said, argued for the view that we create facts;
still less have I defended the view against realist objections. I do not take that
to be my task in this essay. Rather, I want to suggest that looking at facts as
made by us in the sense here briefly elucidated may enable us to escape the
moral vertigo which moral skepticism tends to induce when it causes us to
look at values as made by us. For ordinary men and women as well as most
moral skeptics find the facts of ordinary life quite stable (‘objective’) enough
to make do, and they tend to exaggerate the dependability of science. I have
suggested that the facts are stable enough because our liberty in fact-making
is limited by our various needs to know and a number of constraints related
to those needs. If it turns out that our liberty in creating moral values is
similarly limited by the needs in response to which we create moral values
and by additional constraints related to those needs, then that, one hopes,
will allay some of the anguish produced by the realization that there are no
moral values in the old (intuitionist or transcendental or ‘nonnatural’) sense.
Why then do we need values? The question can be understood in two
senses: (a) when do we, you and I, experience a lack of values? and (b) why
do human beings need any values at all? The answer to the first question is
that we experience a lack of values when there is a lacuna in the structure of
15. Ibid., 48.

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values which generally guides our actions or when we are confronted with a
seemingly irresolvable clash of values. The answer to the second question is
that we need values in order to have reasons (of the kind that may serve as
justifications) for our actions, and more generally in order to choose. That
second need humankind has largely met by constructing complex systems of
morality, law, political arrangements, customs and etiquette, religious prac-
tice, and a host of ‘imperatives of skill’ ranging from cookbook recipes and
instructions for do-it-yourselfers to mathematical algorithms and architects’
blueprints. Only a small part of this system consists of moral values as we
ordinarily understand that phrase, but for my purposes here it does not
matter where (or whether) a clear (or fuzzy) line between moral and non-
moral values might be drawn. Again, some of this complex system has be-
come so thoroughly internalized that it seems now as immune from critique
as is instinctual behavior. One might again raise the question of linedrawing;
but again the question is of no concern in this essay. It is, however, worth
pointing out that any line-drawing in either case is itself a case of fact-mak-
ing and, in so far as it has any bearing on our evaluating of values, of val-
ue-making. Think, for example, of the questions whether prudence and mo-
rality are in conflict or the same in the long run, or whether we have a
Humean sentiment of humanity or moral reason stands over against all in-
clinations.
We may combine these two answers and say that ordinary men and
women, you and I, need values when we are confronted with choices—that
is, when neither instinct, nor deeply ingrained habit, nor internalized values,
nor a set of explicit instructions has set us on a road with no exits. Often,
however, even when we are choosing we do not experience anguish, and this
may be so for various reasons. The choice may be, for us, merely practical
(although it may involve moral considerations for someone else); or some
reflection may cause us to realize that one alternative is clearly ruled out by
moral obligations which we do not intend to shun, and so on. In short, the
part of the complex of morality, law, etc., which we have accepted but need
actively to think about in order to be guided by it will often provide an an-
swer to the question “What shall I do?” Often that answer is of a kind which
will serve as a justification even if things should turn out badly later or if
someone whose moral authority we acknowledge or whose moral judgment
we respect should voice disapproval. In those situations we say, “Yes, I con-
sidered the alternatives carefully, and, yes, I am saddened by what happened;

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but all things considered I could not have done otherwise and still respect
myself, and I would do the same thing again.” Or one might say, “Yes, I
knew that you would disapprove or at any rate that you would act differ-
ently; but still on reflection, and having considered what you would say on
the other side, I am quite sure that I did the right thing.” In these cases we
appeal to the existing structure, the structure provides the values we need,
and we are not forced to examine the basis of that structure.
That much of the structure is made by us is admitted by everyone; the
question whether any of it is not made by us is one of the questions which I
do not intend to address in this essay. My aim is to say merely that even if all
of the structure is made by us, the structure neither in its parts nor as a whole
is arbitrary—it is no more arbitrary than the structure of facts, no more ar-
bitrary than a work of art, no more arbitrary than the work of an artisan; it
will do. The structure will do in the first instance because in building it, in
filling in lacunae, we encounter constraints similar to the constraints en-
countered in the other cases. Let us now see how this happens.
Consider Brutus before the Ides of March. Brutus must choose between
his friendship for Caesar and his hatred of tyranny, between loyalty to a
person and patriotism. Note that the problem is a problem for Brutus as it
might not be a problem for someone else. An enemy of Caesar, a victim of
his tyranny, would not be confronted with the same choice. There are solu-
tions to the problem which are not solutions for Brutus. William Penn, or
any latter-day Friend (i.e., Quaker), would say that it is always wrong to take
a life, and that would settle this problem—there would be a more ultimate
value that these people would have available to justify not participating in
the conspiracy. But that norm is not part of the moral structure in which
Brutus has his being, Brutus must choose as a pagan Roman. The world (as
Brutus sees it) poses the question, gives rise to the need for a value which will
enable Brutus to choose, but in his moral code no such value is available. By
choosing as he chooses and for the reasons for which he chooses Brutus cre-
ates a value.
Now someone might say that there were patriots before Brutus and
there were lovers of liberty before Brutus; has not Brutus simply reaffirmed
that value rather than created it? Just so, our artisan in making a spoon did
not make the first spoon. Human beings do invent, but being human none
of us creates ex nihilo. Human valuemaking is constrained by the values
which are already there (that is why Brutus could not choose to reaffirm

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nonviolence; nonviolence was not available as an option). Brutus could

have evaded the problem; he could have chosen to feign illness, or he
could have committed suicide. If so, he would not have been ‘the noblest
Roman’; since he had so far been a noble Roman, choosing those ways out
would have constituted an incoherence in his value system. Brutus could
have chosen to warn Caesar, or to defend Caesar. What Brutus created was
a ranking of values (recall the child creating facts of sameness) and he
could have created a different ranking.
I am suggesting that a need for new values arises when old values clash.
Sometimes it will be possible to invent a compromise: Rawls takes a concep-
tion of justice, at least in a democratic society, to be a compromise of the
claims of liberty and equality; but similar compromises might be found on
the level of personal rather than social morality. Sometimes it will be neces-
sary to choose and thus to establish a ranking. Such a ranking, as the example
of Brutus illustrates, need not amount to a total rejection of the lower-ranked
value. This is why when things turn out badly, regret, possibly self-doubt, or
guilt, rather than mere sorrow, may overcome us. Sometimes evasion of some
sort (i.e., restructuring the problem as a different problem) is the solution
chosen. But compromise and evasion are themselves more or less acceptable
alternatives to ranking, and in turn, depending on how things work out,
compromise or evasion or ranking will become more or less valued solutions
to problems of value clash.
A value lacuna may also arise not because there are too many values but
because there are not enough values around. James’s example of being given
a chance to participate in an expedition to the North Pole comes to mind.
Of course, one would weigh danger versus excitement, etc.; but I want you
to imagine that one has no obligations which would present a moral obstacle
(tell the story that way; of course, one could tell it also another way). Still,
the story one tells will be, ultimately, very similar to the one told above; only
the values involved are different. The task accomplished by the great taxon-
omists is incomparably greater and more fruitful than the child’s sorting; but
it is a sorting nonetheless. (Although it is, of course, other things as well.)
Two points are to be noted concerning these cases of valuemaking: first,
the creation of values is not arbitrary; it is constrained by the situation, by
the values that are already there, by the character of the chooser. Second,
there was no appeal to absolute or to ultimate values. Because of the absence
of such an appeal someone might say that I have missed the point entirely.

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Brutus may or may not believe that there are objective values in the sense in
which that is denied by moral skeptics; he will in either case have to decide
what to do. At best he will suffer less anguish if he believes that his problem
is merely one of finding out, of coming to know, what he (already, eternally,
transcendentally) ought to do; his responsibility may appear to be less.
The point, the moral skeptics will say, is that the whole structure within
which Brutus chooses is one among many. The values from which Brutus
fashions a new value, the values relative to which Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar
was a noble act, the very concept of nobility as a value, all this is wholly ar-
bitrary unless there are some nonrelative absolute values which are indepen-
dent of any human choosing and willing.
Someone may attempt to come to my rescue and suggest that the objection
has already been answered when I said that the complex moral-legal-political
structures within the confines of which we live and choose and act exist so that
we may live, cooperate, be reasonably secure, and flourish. But that will not
do. I have either prejudged the issue which the moral skeptics are attempting
to raise (who is to say that these are the ultimate basic values?), or else these
categories were chosen deliberately to be so broad that they admit of different
interpretations and elaborations, and it is these interpretations and elabora-
tions which are the basic and ultimate values. I did, in fact, intend the latter
alternative. But that means that these interpretations and elaborations pose
irreconcilable alternatives among which choice is inescapable and where none-
theless no further reasons (justifications) for choosing can be given because
‘until you make this choice, there aren’t any values at all’.
Since I am committed to defend only the view that even if all our values
are made by us, they are not arbitrary (i.e., no more arbitrary than facts);
there are two possible answers to this skeptical challenge available. I might
point out that when we come to deep moral commitments (whether of a
social/political or of an individual sort) we are already adults, we are already
deeply involved in an ongoing moral structure. We may indeed confront the
question of deep commitments because we are seriously dissatisfied with
that structure and want to make extensive changes. Still, we are rebuilding
Neurath’s boat while clinging to it, we are attempting to reach something
like a Rawlsian reflective equilibrium; in short the same sort of constraints
which I described earlier will be at work. Just as fact-making and theo-
ry-making turn out to be intimately interwoven, but facts are nevertheless
solid enough to allow us to navigate a perilous world, so basic values and

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detailed moral structures are intimately interwoven and solid enough to en-
able us to navigate the perils of human relationships.
Although that answer is true as far as it goes, someone might point out
that facts rest in some sense on some ‘stuff’. To be sure, when we call that
stuff sensory inputs, or matter, or energy, or . . . we are already fact-making;
but something is there. And no comparable constraint appears to exist for
the value-making case. This, it seems to me, is the force of the sharp fact/
value distinction on which both the moral skeptics and their moral realist
opponents agree. The moral realist says that values are not part of the natural
world, that no scientific evidence can be adduced in support of ultimate
moral judgments, and the moral skeptic replies that in that case there are no
moral values at all, that ultimate moral judgments are false (or, in another
variant, meaningless). In this essay, I did not present any direct arguments
against the fact/value distinction; however, by regarding facts as well as val-
ues as fabricated, and by looking at values as well as facts as subject to further
evaluation, I have surely cast some doubts on it. If we are able to abandon
that distinction, or bridge that gap, then the same stuff which lends solidity
to facts will also lend solidity to values. Moreover, if a common ground for
talking with people belonging to other cultures, committed to other elabo-
rations of ‘life, cooperation, security, and human flourishing’ is to be found
at all, it will have to be within such a larger structure.
Nevertheless, even the possibility of a seamless web of facts and values
anchored in experience fails to be wholly satisfying. Again and again one is
tempted to raise hard cases. But hard cases are just the case of Brutus all over
again, and we saw both how to deal with that case and that it will arise for
Brutus whatever his ‘meta-ethical’ position may be. The problem is rather
this: if we can say no more than what I have said so far, then “when the secret
police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be
said to them of the form ‘There is something within you which you are be-
traying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which
will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which con-
demns you.’ This thought is hard to live with,” says Rorty.16 I am not yet
convinced that we have to live with it; but let us be clear on the problem.
16. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1982), xiii.

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Richard Boyd has suggested to me that tolerance for other styles in the
arts is possible because museums have many galleries. That the style in which
one has chosen to work may preclude a particular solution to a given prob-
lem does not prevent one from appreciating other styles although one can-
not change styles in mid-work. Even in the sciences, Hilary Putnam re-
minded me, there are times when more than one paradigm is on the scene.
In the absence of one unified paradigm scientists learn to use whichever
paradigm is most appropriate for the problem at hand. Neither artistic styles
nor scientific paradigms are irreconcilable in the sense in which there are
irreconcilable moral positions. There are within a given moral perspective
matters on which reasonable persons differ; there are seen from a given
moral perspective others with which one can sympathize, which one can
even in a sense appreciate. All that was illustrated by the case of Brutus, and
I mentioned just now that one hopes to find a common ground for conver-
sation with adherents of such different moral perspectives. But there is no
possibility of this sort of reconciliation between us and the fascists. That
there is no possibility of this sort of conversation is a vital part of our posi-
tion (as it is of theirs). When I said just now that I am not yet prepared to
live with Rorty’s claim that there is nothing we can say to them, I did not
intend to suggest that we could or would want to engage in a conversation
with them. I do want to suggest that one may be able to find grounds for
saying that fascism is not a moral position at all—just as Rawls found
grounds for saying that egoism is incompatible with the moral point of view.
Such grounds will have to be found, I suspect, in the very notion of what it
is to be a person; but that too is another story.
Note
This work was supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment
for the Humanities.

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25
Perceiving Facts and Values
Ruth Anna Putnam
IN A MEMORABLE PASSAGE near the beginning of “The Moral Philosopher

and The Moral Life,” William James asks us to imagine a world in which all
our dearest social utopias are realized, and then to imagine that this world is
offered to us at the price of one lost soul at the farthest edge of the universe
suffering eternal, intense, lonely pain. Then he asks, “What except a specifi-
cal and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us imme-
diately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happi-
ness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately
accepted as the fruit of such a bargain.”1
I find this passage enormously interesting for a variety of reasons. We
would have an impulse to grasp the utopian world, and that impulse is not
inexplicable: we would be happier in such a world than we are now. The
impulse is even morally defensible: James tells us later in the essay that “there
is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek in-
cessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the
very largest universe of good that we can see.”2 Moreover, he acknowledges
that our best ideals cannot be realized in this poor world without trampling
some other ideals under foot. The realization of the values of good and sen-
sitive people entails the frustration of the desires and goals of cruel and
Works, 6:141–162, 144.
2. Ibid., 158.

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brutal people. Worse, institutions that are on the whole beneficial will have
innocent victims; James mentions monogamous marriage as an example of
such an institution. In a functioning democracy, these are frustrations that
everyone must take in stride sometimes. So should we then not grasp that
utopia, that world without unemployment, without homelessness, where
everyone has access to medical care, where racism and other forms of preju-
dice and oppression are known only from the history books, etc., etc.? Those
commentators who read James as a kind of utilitarian must surely believe
that James would advocate our grasping that ideal, that he would speak not
merely of an impulse to clutch that happiness but of an obligation. But
James is not a utilitarian, and the passage under discussion occurs when
James wants to distance himself from the utilitarians.
We have, he says, a capacity for quite specific emotions, capacities that
cannot be explained in any simple way as the result of evolutionary selection
for the survival of either the individual or the species. He does not mean the
capacity for sympathy, though that too would come into play here. Sympathy
enables us to vividly imagine the suffering of the lost tortured soul, to feel
for it and, indeed, with it. But James means something else; he means a re-
vulsion, an apprehension that to do a certain thing would be ‘hideous’. To
do what? To opt for the utopia? That is not what he says. To enjoy the uto-
pia? Again, that is not what he says. There is nothing wrong with opting for
or enjoying utopia if it can be had at no cost, or at a cost clearly bearable by
those who are obliged to bear it, or if one is nonculpably ignorant of the
price. What is hideous is “enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit
of such a bargain.”
James claims that certain moral facts are immediately felt by a specific
emotion—“a specifical and independent sort of emotion . . . would make us
immediately feel . . . how hideous” it would be. Something is hideous, or
exquisite, or cruel, or generous, and to perceive it as such is to respond with
a specific emotion. I have substituted “perceive” for James’s “feel,” but James
used “feel” in a much wider sense than we do today. In The Principles of
Psychology he announced that he would use “feeling” to refer to “all states of
consciousness merely as such,” that it would cover both sensation and
thought.3 Feelings, in other words, can be cognitive; in fact, James suggested

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PE RCE I V I NG FAC TS A ND VA LU E S 407
that the word “thought” would be preferable because “it immediately sug-
gests the omnipresence of cognition (or reference to an object other than the
mental state itself ).”4 In fact, James uses both “feeling” and “thought” and
sometimes “psychosis” as general terms for states of consciousness. So when
James says that a specific emotion makes us feel the hideousness of a certain
state of affairs, he is saying something entirely analogous to saying, for exam-
ple, that a specific sensation makes us feel the blueness of the sky. In both
cases there is a “reference to an object other than the mental state [the emo-
tion, the sensation] itself.” For both cases, I shall use the term “perceive.”
I do not, however, want to say quite what James says. I find the claim that
a specifical emotion makes us immediately feel how hideous it would be to
do (or experience) a certain thing unclear. What sort of making is this? Is
there a causal process that leads from having a certain emotion to the percep-
tion of the moral features of the situation, as having light reflected from the
sky impinge on the retina might be said to cause us to see a blue sky? That
suggestion has a certain initial plausibility. One can easily enough imagine
James providing a physiology of moral perception, investigating how the
bodily changes that, according to the James-Lange theory, occur when we
have a particular emotion are connected to the corresponding moral percep-
tion. And one might then ask what, if anything, corresponds in that case to,
say, a cut optic nerve in the case of visual perception. But as soon as one asks
that question, one sees that the relation between the emotion and the moral
perception is not like that between the light impinging on the retina and
seeing the sky; it is rather like the relation between having the visual sensa-
tion and the perception of the blue sky. But just as it is infelicitous to say that
having the visual sensation makes one perceive the blue sky, so it is infelici-
tous to say that having the emotion makes one perceive the hideousness of
the imagined situation. Having the visual sensation amounts to perceiving
the blue sky; having the emotion amounts to perceiving the hideousness of
the situation.
I shall say more about this in a moment, for I am not interested here in
quarrelling with James. I am not even interested in what James thought
about perception, moral or otherwise. I am interested in perception. Some
years ago I wrote a paper about the role of the imagination in moral percep-
4. Ibid., 186.

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tion, and when I discussed that paper with my colleagues, I discovered that
at a certain point our conversation came to a standstill because we had quite
different conceptions of perception, of plain ordinary sense perception.5 In
this essay, I want to sketch my conception of perception.
There is a second reason for my interest in perception—namely, my ob-
jection to the fact/value distinction. I have elsewhere argued that facts and
values emerge at the end of inquiry on an equal footing: the facts are val-
ue-laden, and the values are fact-laden.6 Others, beginning with Dewey, to
whose writings I am indebted beyond anything to which footnotes might
testify, have argued in a similar fashion. But since perceptions are the start-
ing points of inquiry, the claim that there is no epistemologically interesting
difference between facts and values rests on shaky grounds unless values en-
ter into the beginning of inquiry on an equal footing with facts.
Dewey distinguished between valuing and evaluating, between prizing
and appraising; I shall use that distinction without, however, claiming that
I am following exactly in his footsteps. A value judgment, a judgment that
something is or has a certain value, is the outcome of an evaluation, a pro-
cess of inquiry; a value we might say is an object-of-evaluation. In contrast,
valuing is immediate, it is an enjoying or suffering, a being angry or grate-
ful, feeling afraid or safe, having a Jamesian “specifical emotion,” etc. It has,
as James said, a reference beyond itself; some thing, event, state of affairs is
being enjoyed or suffered, one is angry at someone, some action, some
happening, etc. That thing or event, that person or action is valued, is per-
ceived to be good or bad, dangerous or trustworthy, hideous or appealing.
We have no word that refers to these objects-of-valuation as distinct from
the objects-of-evaluation. We have in ordinary English no word by which
we distinguish the objects which we see, hear, taste, etc., from the objects
that are known at the end of inquiry, but some philosophers, Dewey among
them, have called the former “percepts,” and Dewey refers to the latter by
the term “object-of-knowledge.” In ordinary English we lack words to mark
these differences because the differences one wants to mark are not differ-
ences between distinct things or distinct qualities; the same object is a per-
5. Ruth Anna Putnam, “Imageries morales e imagination moral” [Moral Images

and Moral Imagination], Dianoia: Anuario de Filosofia 38 (1992): 187–202.
6. See Chapter 24 (“Creating Facts and Values”) and Chapter 5 (“Weaving Seamless
Webs”) of this volume.

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cept at the beginning of an inquiry and an object-of-knowledge at the end;

the terms “object-of-knowledge” and “percept” mark a difference in episte-
mological status only. Of course, many objects-of-knowledge have never
been percepts (atoms, for example, or the state of the economy), and many
percepts are so unproblematic that they prompt no inquiry and, thus, do
not become objects-of-knowledge. Part of the thesis of this essay may now
be stated in a nutshell: objects-of-valuation are related to objects-of-
evaluation as are percepts to objects-of-knowledge.
Cornel West has written, provocatively, of the “American evasion of phi-
losophy,” by which he meant the American rejection of the epistemological
problem set to modern philosophy by Descartes.7 The problem might be
stated simply thus: how can we infer the existence and nature of a public and
permanent world (an external real world) from our private and fleeting sense
data? To this problem, the only answer seems to be ‘you cannot,’ as centuries
of failed philosophical attempts have demonstrated. But, of course, that is
not an acceptable answer; so generations of philosophers continue to devote
themselves to seeking to solve the problem.
It is to my mind the glory of the pragmatists that all of them, rather than
offering vain attempts to solve the problem or accepting the skeptical an-
swer, rejected the problem. They all rejected the philosophical assumption
that our basic data are private sense data. In his brilliant response to Russell’s
Our Knowledge of the External World, Dewey subjects Russell’s formulation
of the problem to a destructive analysis.8 He shows that any formulation of
the problem assumes what it purports to call in question. In calling sense
data fleeting, for example, one contrasts them with things that exist at times
other than the present, hence one assumes time. More importantly, far from
being data, sense data and the various relations among them from which the
common sense world is supposed to be inferred, are instead “the result of an
analysis of the usual crude empirical data, and an analysis which is made
7. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: The University of

Wisconsin Press, 1989).
8. Dewey, “The Existence of the World as a Logical Problem,” in Middle Works,
8:83–97 [Orig. in Essays in Experimental Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1916)].

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possible only by a very complex knowledge of the world” that is supposedly

called in question.9
If we do not begin with sense data, where do we begin? That question is
ambiguous. It might mean where do we begin as newborns? Or it may mean
where do we begin as adults—that is, what are our crude empirical data? The
former question is surely legitimate, and psychologists who study neonatal
behavior give us reason to think that infants discriminate more and earlier
than we used to think. But to describe their behavior as discrimination is to
describe it using a concept that has its original application in the behavior of
older children and adults. Alternatively, we might with Dewey offer the hy-
pothesis “that even the most rudimentary conscious experience contains
within itself the element of suggestion or expectation,” from which he con-
cludes that “the object of conscious experience even with an infant is homo-
geneous with the world of an adult.”10 Of course, suggestion and expectation
are again concepts that have their home in adult experience. Just as we can-
not describe sense data without reference to objects of the commonsense
world, so we cannot describe the neonate’s experience without reference to
the experiences of older children and adults. Thus, we must begin where we
are, begin as adults in everyday life.
In one sense, to be sure, we begin just where the neonate begins, by inter-
acting with our environment. The key word here is “interaction”—indeed,
one might say with some justice that “interaction” is the key word in Dewey’s
philosophy. I am not quite prepared to say, as I believe Dewey would, that
every experience changes both the experiencer and that which is experi-
enced—that is, the rest of the world. The world as a whole is changed, of
course, because I am a part of the world. But it seems to me that when I
enjoy a sunset, or am awed by the starry heavens above, I am changed but
the rest of the world is not, or only to the extent that the atmosphere is
changed by my breathing, and the ground by my walking on it. Dewey has
good reasons to emphasize these small changes; the thought that experience
is a natural event, that the experiencer, or knower, is part of the experienced
or known world, was early in this century, and is still, a thought that takes
many philosophers by surprise. Nevertheless, the difference between what
9. Ibid., 93.
10. Ibid., 95.

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happens to a peach when I enjoy eating it and what happens to the sun and
clouds when I enjoy watching a sunset seems to me as profound as any dif-
ference can be. The peach is certainly changed; the sunset is certainly not
changed; I recognize, however, that these are just end points of a continuum
of more or less mutually invasive interactions.11
I seem to have wandered far afield. I have not. Consider this very mun-
dane happening. Susan comes home loaded with grocery bags, drops them
on the kitchen table, fills a glass with water, drinks thirstily, and begins to
unpack the bags. She takes out a melon, wonders whether it is ripe, tests
whether it is soft at the stem end, smells it, hefts it, concludes that it is not
ripe, that she had better leave it out of the refrigerator so that it will continue
to ripen. Throughout all this, Susan perceives. Her arms ache from the
weight of the bags, she sees the fortunately uncluttered table top, she sees the
glass, feels it smooth in her hand, hears the water running, feels the cool
liquid running down her parched throat. She suffers and enjoys. Her arms
ache, and cease aching when the bags are dropped; her throat is parched, and
the water feels good. We could represent what happened as cases of problem
solving, and if we did that, we would represent them as cases of knowing.
Thus, for example, we could tell this story. Susan’s arms ache; she asks herself
what is to be done. She realizes that her arms would stop aching if she would
put down the bags. She seeks a place to put them. She sees the empty table.
She formulates the hypothesis that the table would be good place for the
bags. She drops the bags on the table. Her arms stop aching. The problem
has been solved; the two hypotheses—that her arms would stop aching and
that the table would be a good place for the bags—have been confirmed.
Susan knows that the table is a good place for bags. The table has become an
object-of-knowledge. If the table, being very old and rickety, had collapsed
under the weight of the bags, Susan’s second hypothesis would have been
disconfirmed; she would now know that the table is not a good place for
11. One might think that these end points correspond to Dewey’s distinction be-
tween experimental and empirical experience, between changes in the environment
deliberately produced to provide us with knowledge versus experiences taken just as
they happen to come along. But I doubt that things line up quite so neatly. Again, one
might think that the experiences that do not change the experienced object are con-
summatory experiences, but enjoying a peach is also consummatory, while an astron-
omer’s carefully planned observations leave the stars as untouched as does my awe.

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bags. The table, now broken, once again would be an object-of-knowledge.

Moreover, although her arms have stopped aching, some eggs have been
smashed and a jar of jam broken. Susan has a new problem; she needs to
clean up a sticky mess.
This version of the story is absurd. Susan does not enact Dewey’s pattern
of inquiry. The version of the story that I originally told is a far more ade-
quate account of what happened. Dewey insisted that perceiving is not
knowing, meaning not that perceiving is never knowing but that it is a way
of being in the world, of interacting with the world that is often, if I may
coin an expression, precognitive. One must acknowledge that ‘knowing’ is a
term fraught with philosophical baggage; different baggage for different phi-
losophers. James, at any rate in The Principles of Psychology, insisted that all
perceiving is cognitive—that is to say, is of something other than itself.
Dewey agreed with that. Dewey insisted that perceiving is not knowing—
that is, is not always accompanied by a perceptual judgment, does not al-
ways occur as part of a process of inquiry. We perceive all the time, in every
waking moment, but we inquire only when we find ourselves in a problem-
atic situation. James would have agreed with that. James rejected the
Cartesian epistemological problem as emphatically as did Dewey.
What then do we want to say about Susan? Clearly, it is absurd to say that
she enacts the pattern of inquiry that I sketched above. She does not do that
until she unpacks the melon. The difference in her behavior with respect to
the melon and with respect to, say, a carton of eggs is striking. The eggs are
put into the refrigerator without any hesitation or, as we say, without think-
ing, just as the bags were put on the table without any hesitation. The melon
is examined, found to be not quite ripe, thought about, and finally left out
of the refrigerator. The not-quite-ripe melon is what Dewey calls an ob-
ject-of-knowledge. Susan thought about the melon, investigated whether it
was ripe, came to believe that it was not. It seems that she did not think
about the eggs.
Perceiving is not, or rather need not be, knowing; that is, it need not be
accompanied by a perceptual judgment. But when Susan comes into the
kitchen with her arms aching from the weight of the bags, does she not believe
that there is a table, that it would be good to put the bags on the table, etc.?
How can she have these beliefs if she doesn’t have these thoughts, if she doesn’t
entertain these propositions? But if we say that she does, we end up ascribing
to Susan a mental life that is radically different from the thoughts that she ac-

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tually has. Actually, all this while Susan is thinking about the dinner party she
will give on Friday, the party for which the melon must be ripe. Peirce, giving
credit to Bain, defined a belief as what one is prepared to act on.12 Clearly,
Susan acts as if she believed that there is a table, that putting the bags on it will
bring relief to her aching arms, etc. We have returned to the point we reached
a while ago. Then I agreed with Dewey’s claim that perceiving is not always
accompanied by perceptual judgments; I have now added that action may
follow upon perception ‘without thinking’ (i.e., without the intervention of a
perceptual judgment). Let us describe what happens in this way. Susan notices
certain features of her environment, features that are noteworthy because of
their relationship to her interests (her interest in getting rid of that load, her
interest in assuaging her thirst). Susan has certain percepts and reacts to them.
What are these percepts? I have answered that question already. A table, a glass,
a faucet: familiar objects of everyday life. But, someone might say, there is
more to these things than meets the eye or the hand. Of course, Susan acts as
if she had entertained and accepted the proposition that there is a table, and if
subsequent experience reveals additional features of these things, especially if
these features are surprising, then Susan will come to entertain and accept a
proposition that revises that never actually entertained perceptual judgment.
The ‘table’ may turn out to be a countertop, the ‘glass’ to be made of plastic,
and the faucet a trompe l’oeil, though none of this will happen to Susan in her
own familiar kitchen.
I have introduced the idea of a perceptual judgment. The ultimate evi-
dence for any knowledge claim is a perception. But only a judgment can
play the role of premise in an inference. Thus we need perceptual judgments.
Although in daily life perceptions may fail to prompt perceptual judgments
and inquiry, that is, percepts may fail to become objects-of-knowledge,
Dewey notes that, because of their evidentiary status, in science perceptions
“become objects of minute, accurate, and experimental scrutiny”—that is,
they become objects-of-knowledge.13 Even in everyday life, perceptions of-
ten function as evidence of some other perception to come; they are used as
signs. “Thus, for practical purposes, many perceptual events are cases of
knowledge; that is they have been used as such so often that the habit of so
12. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:12.


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using them is established and automatic.”14 Let us say, then, that to every
percept there corresponds a possible perceptual judgment, but that judg-
ment may never have been articulated or entertained.
I need to abandon Susan. Tables, glasses, faucets are artifacts; of course,
with respect to them, “the trail of the human serpent is over everything.”15 If
we did not have certain needs and interests, human beings would not have
invented tables, glasses, water systems with their faucets, etc., etc. Of course,
having invented them, we have invented names for them, we value them, we
pass these names and values on to our children, who have the same needs
and interests as we do. What James and Dewey point out is that all our per-
ceivings of natural objects and events as well as of things and situations that
we deliberately bring about are what they are because they are our percep-
tions, where ‘we’ refers variously to the individual perceiver, to the society to
which he or she belongs, or to humanity at large. Let us take these points in
reverse order. James writes that “our fundamental ways of thinking about
things are discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors, which have been able to
preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent time. They form
. . . the stage of common sense.”16 That is, we see the world in terms of things
and events, causes and effects, places and times, etc. But today’s common
sense is not that of a thousand years ago. We do not see witches, for example.
Finally, percepts are also a function of the individual perceiver’s idiosyncratic
beliefs, needs, interests, and values. Susan sees the empty tabletop but fails
to notice the blinking light of the answering machine. Emerson teaches us
in “Nature” to “distinguish the stick of timber of the woodcutter from the
tree of the poet.”17
But, some philosophers will object, the woodcutter’s stick of timber is the
tree of the poet; there is a physical object there and a description, provided
by science, that is not shaped by anyone’s interest. There is the absolute con-
ception of the object that occupies that space-time region. This physical
object, these philosophers insist, is what it is quite independently of us. It
14. Ibid., 110.

17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America,
1978), 9.

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would be what it is even if there were no human beings at all.18 To this I reply
that it is, of course, generally in our interest to pay attention to those features
of the world that we can change only by making a physical effort. Dangers
do not go away because we refuse to face them. Again, it is often in our in-
terest to describe the world in terms that are nonperspectival. Physics and
her sister sciences represent triumphs of human knowledge. For many pur-
poses, the physical description is the only description we want, but there are
other purposes, just as legitimate, just as pressing, for which the physicists’
description is quite useless. I reject both the claim that the so-called absolute
conception is better, from the standpoint of knowledge, than other descrip-
tions, and that it is a description that is not interest-relative. It is precisely
because we have an interest in the kind of knowledge that physical science
provides that we have the physical sciences. It turns out that in order to
satisfy many of our interests, we need the sort of knowledge that the sciences
provide; it turns out also that some people are passionately interested in that
sort of knowledge quite regardless of what other purposes it might serve.
And that is a good thing. But whether one agrees with Peirce that scientists
should pursue the truth single-mindedly, should not even think about its
possible applications, or whether one thinks, as many bioethicists now do,
that it is irresponsible not to consider the consequences of one’s discoveries
in choosing to devote one’s life to science, and in choosing what particular
subjects to pursue, one makes a moral judgment.
Moreover, one would have to have a very narrow conception of value if
one wanted to say that physicists, when they actually do physics, do not
make value judgments. They judge that certain observations are relevant or
irrelevant, that a certain question is interesting while another is not, that a
hypothesis is plausible enough to spend time investigating it, that a certain
procedure is reliable, etc. Into the discovery/invention of a physical theory
value judgments enter again and again. Even aesthetic values play a role.
One theory may be preferred to another because of its elegance, or because
of its appeal to some intuitive sense of how a theory, or the universe, ought
to be. I conclude that there are no objects-of-knowledge, there are no con-
18. I am thinking here of Bernard Williams. And there are philosophers, philoso-
phers as different otherwise as Plato and G. E. Moore, who would say that there are
values that are what they are independent of what any human being actually values. I
am rejecting all these forms of realism.

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ceptions of the world and of the objects in it that are not value-laden. In this
sense, every object-of-knowledge is an object-of-evaluation.
How, then, does a percept differ from, say, a physical object? Here we
must guard against saying that it does not last as long. For if we said that, we
would confuse the event of perception with the object perceived, and we
would have taken a step on the slippery road to sense data. The percept, I
want to say—and here I am not sure whether Dewey would adopt the same
terminology—is the commonsense object. I say deliberately ‘commonsense
object’ rather than with many philosophers ‘material object’ for two reasons.
The first is that I know that rainbows and shadows and mirror images are
commonsense objects just as are sticks and stones, tables and water; I do not
know whether they are material objects. My second reason is that the term
‘material object’ belongs, as Austin has pointed out, to a particular philoso-
phy of perception, precisely the kind of philosophy of perception that I am
rejecting.19 So the percept is the commonsense object; there is, as I said
above, only a difference in epistemological status. That difference is the dif-
ference between perceptual judgments and the judgments to which we are
entitled at the end of inquiry. To be sure, these various judgments form a
continuum; the perceptual judgment lies at one end, it is the most limited
of judgments. I do not mean to say that perceptual judgments are so limited
that they cannot be false, hence that they have no truth-values. “This is here
now” is not a perceptual judgment, and it is useless as a premise. Perceptual
judgments can be false, and they can be found out to be false; they give
some hostages to the future. The perceptual judgment may be “There is a
melon (here, now),” and there may be other perceptual judgments—“It is
very hard, even around the stem” and “It doesn’t feel heavy”—and on the
basis of these perceptual judgments, the latter two the result of deliberate
observations, Susan concluded that the melon was not ripe. “The melon is
not ripe” is for Susan in these circumstances not a perceptual judgment,
though if Susan had thoughtlessly cut into the melon and found its flesh
hard and tasteless, she would have perceived an unripe melon; in the case as
described, she perceives a melon, period. But that melon is the unripe melon
she would have perceived had she cut into it. In short, the percept is the
commonsense object. But perceptual judgments are least judgments, giving
19. J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 4.

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only limited hostages to the future. Although perceptual judgments mark

the beginning of inquiry, they occur throughout the process. They mark, at
least in principle and potentially, also its end. But at the end they are like the
last piece placed in a jigsaw puzzle; it is the whole picture, the object-
of-knowledge, not the final percept that gets our attention. For the sake of
completeness, and to forestall possible misunderstandings, I want to add
that the object-of-knowledge at the end of inquiry need not be a common-
sense object; it may be the state of the economy, or a pulsar, the virus that
causes AIDS, or the authenticity of a Rembrandt painting; none of these are
commonsense objects.
To summarize, perceptual judgments are implicated in all our knowings,
and the beliefs we already hold are implicated in our perceivings. Perceptual
judgments are the points at which the web of our beliefs is attached to expe-
rience, but what those points are is a function not only of the world but of
the whole web of beliefs. Our percepts and our beliefs make up our percepts
and our beliefs.
Some of our percepts are what I have called valuings, and some of our
beliefs are the results of evaluations, are value judgments. You will recall
Susan’s aching arms and parched throat as well as her relief when the load
was relinquished and the pleasure of the cold drink. These instances of valu-
ings are so unproblematic, so often experienced, that no evaluation is called
for. On the other hand, consider James’s example. Both seeing the described
world as utopia and seeing the hideousness of deliberately accepting its en-
joyment at the cost of one lonely soul’s eternal torture are valuings, valuings
that show themselves in conflicting impulses: an impulse to grasp and an
impulse to push away. That is one sort of situation that prompts evaluation.
Reflection, an indispensable part of any inquiry, reveals here that what is
attracting is utopia, while what is repelling is deliberately accepting utopia at
a horrendous price. While these are not identical, they are so connected that
one cannot have one without the other. Of course, this problem is an imag-
ined problem, but in less extreme forms it is a problem that arises in ordi-
nary life. It arises for anyone who believes that he or she can do a great deal
of good for many people if only he or she is willing to do a grievous injustice
to a particular person. The problem may present itself as the problem of
dirty hands—what sort of person would I be if I did this or that? Or it may
present itself as wanting desperately the happiness of a large number of peo-
ple and yet being utterly repelled by the suffering of that lonely soul. Or it

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may seem entirely obvious that one must sacrifice the lonely soul for the sake
of millions of starving children and homeless men and women. Or, again, it
may seem obvious that one cannot use even one soul as a mere means to an
otherwise general happiness. The last two possibilities show how accepting a
normative theory may shape one’s valuings, just as accepting an optical the-
ory may shape what one sees. Conversely, that a moral theory blinds one to
morally significant features of a situation may be a reason for rejecting the
theory, just as physical theories are rejected if they cannot be reconciled with
well-known phenomena.
And just as valuings and values can and do shape one’s percepts, so beliefs
shape one’s valuings and values. People did not simply see a witch; they
feared and hated her. They saw an evil old woman; today we see an ugly old
woman. We may pity her or may be repelled by her ugliness, but our revul-
sion is aesthetic, not moral.
I said earlier that perceiving is the sine qua non of inquiry. I want to point
out now that, in particular, inquiry is prompted by valuing, though not all
valuings prompt inquiry, and even when a valuing prompts inquiry that in-
quiry may not be an evaluation—that is, its aim may not be to arrive at a
value judgment. What prompts inquiry, according to Peirce, is doubt, an
uncomfortable state, a state that we wish to get out of, a state that is valued
negatively. Dewey says that inquiry begins when one finds oneself in a prob-
lematic situation—when the outcome of the situation is not clear. Dewey
emphasized, as he always does, the objectivity of a problematic situation. It
is not the perceiver’s state of mind; it is the actual situation that is problem-
atic. Nevertheless, it is not the situation that institutes an inquiry; it is we
who do that. We do that because we find that we cannot, in this situation,
continue without thinking. Of course, the experience may be on the whole
pleasant. Scientists do not find what they do unpleasant; they find it inter-
esting, exciting, sometimes even exhilarating. They deliberately put them-
selves into a situation in which they are driven to inquire. Thus, although I
mentioned Peirce, I do not want to say that what prompts inquiry is always
an unpleasant feeling. Still, in ordinary life, it is most often the case that
inquiry begins when things go wrong, when our habitual ways of acting and
reacting are unsuccessful or blocked. Dewey reminds us that we should more
often than we do evaluate our valuings. For example, we should wonder how
an enjoyed situation came about, how it can be prolonged, or whether part
of its charm is precisely that it is short-lived. We should wonder how it, or

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something like it, can be reproduced. We are far more likely to ask the anal-
ogous questions about an unpleasant situation. Dewey’s advice is worth lis-
tening to. We do all too often fail to consider the price someone else is pay-
ing for our joys. Yet I also think that philosophers, including Dewey, tend to
overintellectualize our lives, tend to concentrate on events and situations
that can be thought about fruitfully. But it is also, especially for us who dwell
in cities, important to remember that there are joys that we may and must
just take and enjoy. Once again, I remind you of watching a sunset.
Determining what we might call for short the price of an enjoyment is, of
course, only one example of an evaluation. Deciding what to do in a dirty
hands situation is another. The variety of moral situations is staggering, and
they form only a subclass of the class of situations in which a value judgment
is conspicuously sought as the outcome of inquiry. This is not the place to
rehearse the sort of reasoning one goes through in such cases. While it comes
to some as a surprise that value judgments are inextricably enmeshed in
theoretical reasoning, everyone acknowledges that one’s command of the
facts plays an important part in one’s practical reasoning. What I want to
stress here are two things. First, that value judgments are shaped and tested
by valuings, just as scientific and commonsense judgments are shaped and
tested by percepts; second, that one’s valuings are shaped by the values one
already has, in particular by the values shared in one’s society, or by human
beings in general, just as we saw in greater detail that percepts are shaped by
beliefs one already has. Thus, I might add to my earlier pronouncement the
following: our valuings and our values make up our valuings and our values.
Although I am coming to the end of this essay, I want to emphasize this
last point. I believe that the view I am defending differs quite radically from
that of so-called moral realists, but I cannot defend this here. What I can do
is to tie up the bits and pieces of this essay.
My title speaks of perceiving facts and values. Whenever one wants to
undermine the fact/value distinction one is forced to use the fact/value vo-
cabulary. But the very vocabulary is misleading. Of course there is a differ-
ence between what one says when one says how the world is and what one
says when one says how the world ought to be, but it will not do to say that
the former is a statement of facts and the latter of values. For descriptions of
the actual world that contrast with prescriptions for a better world have to
speak of cruelty and of kindness, of ingratitude and compassion, of just and
unjust institutions, etc., etc. Descriptions and prescriptions will have to use

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the same vocabulary, and only experience can tell whether our prescriptions
were wise or not. Moreover, I have tried to argue that valuings and evalua-
tions are implicated in knowledge claims that do not purport to be value
judgments, and conversely that perceptual and other purportedly value-free
knowledge claims are implicated in value judgments.
Have I, then, defended the thesis that we perceive facts and values?
Actually, I have defended the view that perceiving/valuing is only the begin-
ning of a process of inquiry/evaluation at the end of which we are entitled to
claim knowledge of facts and of values. Let me return one more time to
William James’s example. Ignore that James imagined the example; ignore
also that his point was to draw our attention to the fact that we have moral
perceptions. Recall simply that we began with a fact: either countless people
will lead brief and miserable lives or one human soul will suffer eternal tor-
ture. Accepting that fact, we found ourselves in moral agony: how can one
possibly choose? Were this a real situation, we should by now be suspicious
of the fact. We should wonder what hidden valuations lead to that under-
standing of the situation. The U.S. Congress has sacrificed the health and
welfare of hundreds of thousands of children because the men and women
who voted for so-called welfare reform accepted without question certain
economic and political facts—for example, that the defense budget cannot
be cut or that certain taxes must not be raised. They accepted as a fact that
they had only a limited number of alternatives. Their values (their commit-
ment to a balanced budget, their contempt for welfare ‘queens’) blinded
them to other alternatives and to the long-run consequences of the alterna-
tives that they did see. Being thus ill-informed, they decided neither wisely
nor well.

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26
Democracy and Value Inquiry
Ruth Anna Putnam
PRAGMATISTS ARE EMPIRICISTS , only more so. Pragmatists hold not only,
as do all empiricists, that our knowledge of the world rests on experience;
they also demand that our philosophical claims should rest on experience
and thus be liable to empirical refutation. When philosophers appeal to ac-
tual human experience, pragmatists believe, they will see that what is expe-
rienced is not limited to what is apprehended by the five senses, that it in-
cludes enjoying and suffering in multiple ways, and that these are indeed the
origins of many of our values. Again, taking experience as it is actually expe-
rienced, pragmatists note that experiencing is doing as well as cognizing.
Moreover, in so far as doing involves foresight doing involves having ends-
in-view, that is to say, values. On this rich notion of experience pragmatists
develop a theory of valuation that explains how our value judgments can be
objective without being reduced to some limited “value-free” vocabulary. I
shall develop such a theory of valuation in the next section.
Pragmatists are democrats, only more so. Pragmatists endorse not only
political democracy, as do all democrats, but they also insist on social, lib-
eral, and pluralistic democracy. William James and John Dewey engaged
actively in constructive criticisms of our democratic institutions as they ex-
isted in their times, and that tradition has been carried forward by Hilary
Putnam and Richard Rorty, to name just two contemporaries. That commit-
ment to democracy in a wide sense follows, I believe, from the conception of
value inquiry as empirical inquiry, although one might share the commit-
ment to democracy without accepting the account of values I shall present.

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John Rawls, surely the foremost political philosopher of the twentieth cen-
tury, was not a pragmatist, yet his conception of justice as fairness is a con-
ception of democracy in a wide sense.1 Moreover, although Rorty does not
agree with my account of value inquiry, his commitment to democracy in a
wide sense is beyond dispute.2 In the final section of this essay I shall sketch
a conception of democracy as it relates to my account of value inquiry.
One additional preliminary remark is called for. The account of value
inquiry that I shall present here is opposed to major trends in ethical theory.
Throughout most of the twentieth century and to this day, noncognitivism,
either in the form of expressivism (emotivism) or in the form of relativism,
has been the favored philosophical account of moral judgments or of value
judgments in general.3 However, noncognitivism fails to account, is unable
to account, for the importance of moral and other values in our lives. Of
course, I am not suggesting that noncognitivists cannot or do not lead exem-
plary moral lives; some of the most admirable human beings I have known
were noncognitivists. I am suggesting that such people hold one set of beliefs
in the study and another outside. The pragmatist account of value inquiry is
also opposed to aprioristic ethics; such theories flourished in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries and have appeared again here and there
at the present time. Those theories fail to account for the moral anguish one
experiences when one’s ethical values conflict, and in so far as such theories
support fanaticism, they stifle moral growth. Again, I cast no aspersions on
the moral character of particular proponents of such positions.
In contrast, James and Dewey developed their philosophies precisely in
response to the passionate desire to make sense of our moral lives, of the
importance of moral values as well as the anguish caused by value conflict. I
believe that this desire, this moral impulse, as I have called it elsewhere, ex-
plains their metaphysical and epistemological positions as well as their ac-
count of value inquiry. I shall, however, leave these epistemological and on-

1971).
2. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
3. Alan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Bernard Williams, Ethics and the
Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985).

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DE MOCR AC Y A ND VA LU E I NQU IRY 423
tological matters aside for present purposes. Here it is appropriate merely to

state baldly that moral concerns make sense only if we experience a common
world and have some control over our actions. For example, my taking care
not to step on your toe makes sense only if (a) the toe I would step on is
indeed the same toe as that in which you would feel pain and (b) I have some
control over my actions and thus over your experiences. These are, however,
beliefs that we normally do not articulate; they constitute a set of silent pre-
suppositions. Better, they are perspectives from which we experience our-
selves and the world in which we live.
Values
One is tempted to ask, “Where do our values come from?” That temptation
ought to be resisted. The question suggests that values are some sort of enti-
ties that come from somewhere, as pineapples come from Hawaii. In a world
without sentient beings there might be pineapples, but neither pineapples
nor anything else would be valued. Sentient beings value things, states of
affairs, other sentient beings and themselves, character traits, actions, etc. I
say, “sentient beings,” because clearly the animals we know best—our vari-
ous pets—value food (and some foods more than others), warmth, attention
from their human companions, etc. Some values are shared by all animals
including us humans; others are unique to a single individual; most fall
somewhere in between. To say that animals “value” certain things is not a
misplaced anthropomorphism; it is meant to draw attention to the fact that
to value something is sometimes simply to react to it in certain characteristic
ways. To seek it, to protect it from others, or to shun it or attack it.
Things have value because someone values them, but that is not to say
that value judgments are subjective, or mere expressions of feelings (emo-
tions, attitudes). On the contrary, in this section I shall, following James and
Dewey, argue that value judgments, in particular moral judgments, can be
and often are objective, just as perceptual judgments can be and often are
objective. Of course, some value judgments and some perceptual judgments
are subjective, and some of these are even acknowledged to be so. But I am
here concerned with objectivity.
Some things that we value (positively or negatively) simply befall us and
we react with delight or with disgust, with interest or with boredom, with

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love or hate, with fear or with feeling safe, etc. And these reactions in turn
shape how we experience the world; an insecure person mistakes many inno-
cent comments as negative criticisms. But we are not condemned passively
to accept our reactions; they are themselves subject to criticism and revision.
Thus one may be disgusted with one’s own unreasonable fear and “talk one-
self out of it.” Others will also criticize one’s likes and dislikes, one’s enthusi-
asms, one’s behavior. In short, one’s valuations will be evaluated. I follow
here Dewey’s Theory of Valuation.4 This is how we differ from animals; we do
not merely suffer or enjoy. Though there are times when we react instinc-
tively, often we think before we act. We inquire into the causes and conse-
quences of our sufferings and enjoyments, into how to prevent or lessen the
former and bring about or extend the latter. In short, we are intelligent
agents.
We value many kinds of things—we admire or despise some people and
are indifferent to most, we praise or condemn some conduct, we take delight
in some works of art, we work hard to earn an advanced degree. There are
many kinds of values: moral values, aesthetic values, economic values, etc.
Just as we trust our perceptions unless we have specific reasons to doubt
them, so we trust our unreflective valuations unless we have specific reasons
to doubt them. But our interests extend far beyond sense perception, the
satisfaction of urgent bodily needs, and immediate emotional reactions. So
we have sciences (physical, social, historical); we have arts and literature; we
have religion; we have philosophy. We have morality and politics.
William James wrote: “I cannot understand the willingness to act, no
matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good or bad.”5 He
meant that one must believe that the world will be, in however small a way,
really better if one chooses one way and really worse if one chooses another.
Although the remark just quoted introduced James’s argument for free will,
I shall use it, as he might as well have done, to defend the objectivity of
(some) moral judgments. So used, the force of “really” is that it is not just in
one’s own estimation that the world will be better or worse. For if one be-
lieves that the difference matters only in one’s own estimation, one suc-
cumbs more easily to the temptation not to do what one believes to be one’s
4. Dewey, Theory of Valuation, in Later Works, 13:191–250.


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duty. For when one succumbs to the temptation not to do what one believes
to be one’s duty, one tends to tell oneself in some way or other that what one
is not doing is really not one’s duty. But those thoughts are second thoughts;
the first thought, in the sort of case I have in mind, is, simply, “This is what
I ought to do.” In these cases, taking those first thoughts to be as reliable as
the evidence of our senses, that is, reliable unless there are specific reasons for
doubt, is an important defense against temptation. Thus, for example, one
knows that one ought to finish grading those student papers rather than go
to the movies.
I do not, of course, claim that the thought that one ought to finish grad-
ing those papers is as unmediated as the baby’s rejection of a bitter-tasting
medicine, or even as unlearned as one’s own pity on seeing a person in pain.
Morality, as Dewey said more than once, is social. Convictions and commit-
ments are often the result of deliberation, reflection, inquiry; yet some of our
deepest convictions may be rooted in lessons learned in childhood. The same
is true of the principles that guide our conduct and the norms that have
become habits, virtuous or otherwise. Dewey’s distinction between custom-
ary and reflective morality is useful here.6 When one begins to engage in
moral inquiry, one stands already within a customary morality consisting
partly of one’s society’s mores and partly of the principles and values mod-
eled and taught by one’s parents. Though we may criticize, modify, or even
to some extent reject outright the morality we are taught as children, we
would not have become the moral beings we are were it not for those moral
starting points.
Some remarks concerning the role of moral principles or norms may be
in order here. First, it is worth noting that one is often far clearer concerning
a particular case than one is concerning the “principle” that seems to justify
one’s judgment. Indeed, the principle may on examination prove to be
flawed, while one’s judgment concerning the particular case remains un-
changed. Thus I continue to admire the young Americans who joined the
Canadian Air Force in order to fight against Nazi Germany while the United
States was still neutral. Yet I fail to formulate an acceptable principle that
would justify their actions and, thus, my admiration. Nevertheless, failure to
find a principle that would justify one’s action should give one pause, should

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prompt moral inquiry. Being deeply committed to a cause or a goal, one

may become convinced that some action is essential to its realization; one
may find the very idea of refraining from that action inconceivable. This
may be all to the good; reflection may undermine one’s courage to do what
needs to be done. On the other hand, when the action under consideration
runs counter to one’s moral principles, failure even to conceive of alterna-
tives may lead to horrific consequences. Great crimes have been and con-
tinue to be committed in the name of patriotism or religion, and at least
sometimes the perpetrators are genuinely convinced that they have no
choice.
What then prompts value inquiry, and in particular moral inquiry?
Inquiry, any inquiry, as Dewey points out, is prompted when one finds one-
self in a problematic or indeterminate situation. How such a situation will
develop is not clear and may depend wholly or in part on what one does. I
am inclined to think that in all inquiry value judgments will play a role, but
often values are not the point of the inquiry. For in every inquiry many
things are fixed, many beliefs are taken for granted, and often the relevant
value judgments are among those beliefs. Research scientists, for example,
take for granted the importance of their fields and the reliability of their re-
search methods. The point of their inquiries is to add to our knowledge; the
value of that aim is not in question. Nevertheless, they will have occasion to
judge the accuracy of their data, the relevance of other scientists’ findings to
their own work, etc. This “entanglement of facts and values,” as Hilary
Putnam calls it, shows that there is no such thing as a completely value-free
science.7 Unless at least some value judgments are objective, science itself is
not objective. But, someone may object, the values to which scientists appeal
in their work are not moral values; they are epistemic values. The objector
may well be prepared to grant the objectivity of epistemic values, while in-
sisting on the subjectivity of moral values and on their irrelevance to scien-
tific knowledge. However, moral judgments do influence what is known;
they play a role in determining the subjects to be investigated and, in some
cases, whether certain research methods are morally permissible and hence
used. Thus, scientists have to justify the value to society or to their employers
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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of the work they propose to do, and research involving human subjects must
pass certain requirements designed to protect the subjects. In short, unless
these moral judgments are objective, the objectivity of science is called into
question.
Inquiries into values of various kinds are relevant to one’s conduct; the
upshot of such inquiries are what Dewey called “Judgments of Practice.”8
They are judgments that advise, suggest, demand, warn against, prohibit,
etc., certain conduct. Writ large, they are recommendations, decisions, or-
ders, legislation, policies. As mentioned above, such judgments are made
when one finds oneself in a situation of uncertain outcome, where one’s ac-
tion (or some relevant person’s action) will make a difference to the future,
at least in some limited respect. A major accident blocks my usual way to
work; I must choose one of several alternative routes. If time is limited, I will
take what I hope will be the fastest route. If time is not an issue, I may
choose a longer but more scenic route that I normally do not allow myself to
take. The upshot of my deliberations is a judgment of practice. Note, by the
way, that, were I less conscientious, I might have been tempted to abandon
my attempt to go to work.
In my example, and in numerous others that spring to mind, the goal to
be reached appears not to be in question—to cure the patient, to make a
profit, to earn a higher degree; the question appears to be only how best to
reach that goal. But that appearance is misleading. One discovers, as one
considers what measures to take to reach one’s goal, that these means have a
price. If I take the faster route, I give up the rare pleasure of driving along
the ocean. If I take the scenic route, I give up some time during which I
could have read an article by a colleague, as I had planned before I discov-
ered my usual route was blocked. My goal turns out to be not simply to
reach my office but to improve my mood or my mind. Dewey used the term
“ends-in-view” in place of “goal” or “end” in order to draw our attention to
the fact that our goals do not enter into our deliberations as unalterable fixed
points to be unflinchingly pursued. Rather, our ends-in-view are themselves
provisional, subject to change as we consider the means by which to attain
them and the costs of those means. In fact, our ends-in-view are themselves
“means,” for they give direction to our inquiry and limit its scope.

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My example was trivial. But the point, one that Dewey made again and
again, is far from trivial. Noncognitivist philosophers tend to say that while
judgments concerning the goodness of ends are neither true nor false, are
mere expressions of one’s feelings, judgments concerning means—that is,
judgments of the form “A is a means to B” or even “A is an efficient (or el-
egant, or inexpensive, or . . .) means to B”—have truth-values, for they as-
sert a causal connection between A and B, and assertions concerning causal
relations can be confirmed or disconfirmed. I want to reject both conten-
tions. First, as already stated, our ends do not simply befall us; we are not
the helpless victims of our own feelings of attraction or repulsion, desire or
aversion, etc. Even when we are passive as, for instance, in listening to mu-
sic, our tastes can and will be formed; we may become more discerning,
more critical, or more appreciative of a certain type of music or of a partic-
ular performance of a particular piece. When we are agents, when what will
happen depends (in part) on us, we reevaluate the state of affairs we wish to
(help) bring about as we consider the means we should have to employ.
That process of reevaluation will continue not only as long as one is work-
ing toward the end-in-view, but also after it has been attained. William
James considered becoming a painter, studied painting for a year, and de-
cided to turn to a career in science. He became a physician but did not
practice medicine. He became instead a distinguished psychologist and
philosopher. The point of this example is not to denigrate those who pursue
their goals with single-minded effort—my mention earlier of the young
American flyers should prevent that misunderstanding—the point is sim-
ply to draw attention to the fact that the process of evaluation need not,
and sometimes does not, come to an end when the end-in-view has been
attained. Of course, the fact that goals can be reevaluated after they have
been attained does not mean that they should be so reevaluated in all or
even in most cases. Most individuals who earn a medical degree go on to
practice medicine or engage in medical research; their goals, once achieved,
become part of the situation in which their lives go on.
Just as it is false to say judgments concerning ends cannot be warranted,
it is false to say that judgments concerning means are mere descriptions of
causal relationships. A woman has suffered an incapacitating stroke; her hus-
band has to decide how to provide for her care. Should she be moved into a
nursing home, or should he arrange for a practical nurse to come for several
hours a day while he plays an active role in her care during the other hours?

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Of course, there are financial issues. Let us suppose those issues are not de-
cisive. Is the man willing to take on responsibilities that he has never had to
face? Is he capable, temperamentally and physically, of undertaking the task?
How would the woman respond to being moved out of her home? Or, were
she to stay at home, would she see herself as a “burden” on her husband?
These considerations and others have to be weighed against each other. And
what is the end-in-view? Physical comfort of the patient? Emotional support
for her? Peace of mind of the husband? All of these?
Dewey spoke of a means-ends continuum. Hilary Putnam speaks of the
entanglement of facts and values. What is at issue is the objectivity of value
judgments. William James pointed out that truth requires a standard outside
the thinker. The point is perfectly general, although he made it in his discus-
sion of moral philosophy.9 Consider the general point first. We take as our
paradigm of objectivity the physical sciences. That objectivity is often said to
be due to their content; scientific truths are not relative to the perspective of
the observer or theoretician. That claim presupposes a narrow notion of
perspective. We have an interest in knowledge that is nonperspectival in this
narrow sense. But that interest itself provides a perspective that excludes
from view much that makes life worth living. Thus, it is not the content of
the sciences that should be taken as a model for objectivity; it is their meth-
ods. Specifically, what makes for objectivity is the willingness to revise one’s
judgments in the face of discordant experience—that is, fallibilism. By em-
phasizing the entanglement of facts and value, or of means and ends, one
makes it possible to be fallibilist about value judgments, including moral
judgments.
A second characteristic often associated with objectivity is intersubjectiv-
ity. Thus it is often said that in the sciences we can reach agreement, but in
morals, and even more so in politics, we cannot. This objection to the sort
of view I am defending is too facile. At most one can say that in the sciences
competent investigators tend to come to an agreement within a relatively
short while, though in the case of major scientific revolutions that while may
well be a human generation. Once a theory has been generally accepted,
acceptance becomes itself a criterion of competence. In everyday life, as psy-
Works, 6:141–162.

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chologists have pointed out repeatedly, descriptions of, say, accident scenes
differ widely between equally unbiased observers. Indeed, whenever one has
to rely on memory, and especially when emotions are involved, agreement
concerning “what really happened” is harder to attain than noncognitivist
philosophers acknowledge.
On the other hand, while spectacular and apparently intractable moral
and political disagreements do, alas, occur with tragic consequences, there
are wide-reaching agreements not only within but also across cultures.
Moreover, the boundaries between cultures are by no means as impervious
as relativists imagine them to be.10 In any case, while in the sciences we can,
and indeed we must, be satisfied with agreement between competent inves-
tigators, on moral and political questions we seek agreement at least among
all those affected. We take for granted that all human beings beyond a cer-
tain age and capable of speech and action are competent participants in the
moral life.
Of course, this last statement is itself subject to dispute. Slave-owners
deny that their slaves are competent moral agents; dictators deny that their
subjects are competent political agents; women are often regarded as not, or
not fully, competent agents by their governments or by their husbands, fa-
thers, or brothers. But the slaves, the women, and the subjects of the dicta-
tors (and anyone else whose moral competency has been denied) will cry
out. As William James points out, we must, as moral inquirers, listen for and
hear “the cries of the wounded.” Those cries, he held, will inform us if we
have made a great mistake.11
What has just been said makes it clear that one cannot engage in
meta-ethical reflections without making ethical commitments. I cannot de-
fend my claim that moral judgments can be as warranted as perceptual judg-
ments without saying what counts as “evidence” that a mistake has been
made. Following James, I suggest that the cries of those who have been hurt
by the mistake demand at least a reconsideration, and often a revaluation. I
speak with caution because it is often impossible to avoid hurting someone.
To repair an injustice or other wrong one must sometimes “wound” unin-
volved bystanders. A program that sends children from low-income families
10. Michelle Moody-Adams, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and

Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
11. James, “The Moral Philosopher,” 158.

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to summer camp will exclude children whose family income is just barely
above the cutoff line. That exclusion may well cause pain but is no reason to
abandon the program. It may, of course, encourage efforts to expand the
program.
Introducing his “Theory of the Moral Life,” Dewey characterized a
moral situation as a situation that involves a voluntary action, though not
all voluntary actions are morally judged.12 It involves, a point made by
both James and Dewey, an action that expresses character. More impor-
tantly, a moral or immoral action shapes character. Thus, according to
James, the question one faces when confronted by a difficult moral choice
is the question “What sort of person shall I be if I do this?” Of course, it is
not, it cannot be, the only question one faces. The man who chooses to
take care of his wife chooses not only to be a caring, patient, etc., man; he
also chooses a certain kind of life for himself and, as far as it depends on
him, a certain kind of life for his wife. He will have tried to imagine in
some detail what those lives will be like.
He will have determined that he has, or can learn, the practical skills he
will require. He will have, as far as possible, consulted the wishes of his wife.
He will have found out what medical professionals consider most beneficial,
etc. In short, he has engaged in an inquiry concerning ends and the means
to them. As I imagine this situation, one cannot say that one course of action
is morally required and the other forbidden, yet the husband experiences the
situation as a moral quandary and his ultimate choice as morally required.
Now let us suppose that after some months he finds that he needs to hire
more and more help, that he finds the task of caring for his wife’s physical
well-being increasingly burdensome. He may finally conclude that he un-
derestimated the difficulties or overestimated his strength, that with all the
best will—one might say from too abundant love—he made the wrong de-
cision. Both he and his wife were “wounded” by that decision, and his ability
to hear her cry, as well his own discomfort, will enable him to change course.
Here a classical utilitarian might wonder why pragmatists tell such a com-
plicated story. Why can one not just determine which course of action will
maximize “the good” of all those affected? If one were then to follow that
course, would one not be doing the right thing? And if one adopted that

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norm—to maximize good—would one not avoid all conflicts of duties,

since the duty to maximize good would override all others? Alas, or rather
fortunately, there cannot be such a norm. We cannot be obliged to maximize
something that is not a quantity. We value numerous things in numerous
ways. There is no common unit to which all values may be reduced; there is
no scale on which one can rank such diverse goods as a performance of the
Brandenburg quartets, teaching a child to read, reaching the top of Mount
Everest, discovering extraterrestrial life, and, say, a billion dollars. Often, not
always, we must choose, although there is no scale on which one alternative
is “better” than the other. Again often, not always, we value the opportunity
to choose as much, sometimes more, than the choice we make. Classical
utilitarianism fails to take this value into account. It also fails—and this
seems to me an equally serious failing—to recognize and acknowledge as
justified the anguish with which one faces some moral situations. The very
suggestion that, in principle, there exists a measure and an algorithm that
will provide the correct answer to every moral quandary devalues crucial
features of our moral lives. No utilitarian calculus can help you if you must
choose, like the biblical Jonathan, between loyalty to your friend David and
loyalty to your royal father, Saul. Finally, I said that “fortunately” the various
goods we enjoy cannot be reduced to one quantity; our lives would be im-
measurably more boring and thus poorer if we were able to enjoy only one
kind of good.
Nevertheless, consequences are important; moral inquiry will always con-
cern itself with the consequences of various courses of action, and it will
consider consequences in a very wide sense, including, as I already men-
tioned, consequences for the character of the agent. Moral inquiry, properly
conducted, will pay particular attention to the cries of the wounded, to
those disadvantaged by a proposed course of action. But one can be a conse-
quentialist in this sense without being committed to the impossible task of
maximizing some nonexistent quantity.
It is worthwhile to add here that there are consequences that can be quan-
tified, and in the social and political arena these consequences play an im-
portant role. I am thinking of life expectancy, per capita income, literacy rate,
various measures of well-being that have been proposed. I do not, in any
sense, want to denigrate these values. However, one must realize that basing
one’s argument on one scale rather than another (compare, for example, Sen’s

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capability approach with an approach based on per capita income) is itself a

value judgment, indeed a moral judgment.13 Policies based on different bases
may have very different consequences, particularly for the least advantaged.
To summarize. Moral inquiry is a species of value inquiry; value inquiry
is a species of inquiry. We engage in such inquiry when, for one reason or
another, we cannot go on in habitual ways.
I have considered various types of such problematic situations. I do not
claim that there is an algorithm for solving moral problems, nor do I believe
that we have a special faculty of moral insight (whether that is thought to be
divinely inspired or not). What we take for moral insight are deeply in-
grained moral habits; we should take them seriously (we cannot help doing
that with any deeply ingrained habit), but that does not mean that they are
immune from reflective criticism. Fallibilism extends to so-called intuitions
as well as to judgments arrived at after careful inquiry. That is our only de-
fense against fanaticism. We learn that we are in error from the cries of those
whom we cause to suffer. We are motivated to respond to those cries by
sympathy. Dewey wrote:
To put ourselves in the place of others, to see things from the standpoint of
their purposes and values, to humble, contrariwise, our own pretensions and
claims till they reach the level they would assume in the eye of an impartial
sympathetic observer, is the surest way to attain objectivity of moral knowl-
edge. Sympathy is the animating mold of moral judgment not because its
dictates take precedence in action over those of other impulses (which they do
not do) but because it furnishes the most efficacious intellectual standpoint.
. . . Through sympathy the cold calculations of utilitarianism and the formal
law of Kant are transported into vital and moving realities.14
Democracy
Fallibilism in any social arena demands that all relevant voices be heard. The
sciences flourish where the free exchange of ideas and results is encouraged;
13. Amartya Sen, The Standard of Living (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987).
14. Dewey, Later Works, 7:270–271.

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scientists are troubled when reasons of state (or commercial profit) demand
secrecy. The arts languish when they are censured, when some government
authority proscribes what it regards as “decadent” or otherwise politically
suspect. Yet we cannot do without any government. Law and its enforce-
ment make social living possible. We are social animals; we need to live with,
cooperate with, others of our kind. We need rules that prevent us from col-
liding with one another either literally or figuratively. So we need legislators
authorized to enact the rules and we need executives to enforce the rules; we
need, finally, a judiciary to adjudicate disputes. In other words, we need
government. This is not meant to be a fictitious history of the origins of
government, or a philosophical myth to establish legitimacy. It simply points
out that, in a fairly densely populated and technologically complex world,
we could not manage without the institutions of government. Of course,
this is not news; it has been true for millennia. Over time, the need for gov-
ernments over larger and larger territories and ever greater numbers of indi-
viduals has become ever more urgent. Advocates of world government are
simply carrying that reasoning to its ultimate conclusion. However, I do not
intend to argue for that ideal; rather, I wish to give reasons in favor of the
sort of wide democracy that James and Dewey championed in their day, and
that seems to me to be the most important social ideal.
So far, however, I have only claimed that we human beings need govern-
ment of some sort in order to function. To say that is like saying that we
need food in order to live. It is sufficiently vague to elicit virtually universal
agreement. Yet even a brief survey of history shows that governments or, as
would be more precise, rulers have often been a major source of suffering for
their subjects. We want, then, a government that will not be a major source
of suffering but rather will enable citizens to flourish. What kind of society,
that is, what kind of social organization, is called for? By analogy with the
case of the sciences and the arts, we may say that societies will flourish and
permit their members to flourish if they permit the free exchange of ideas,
including in particular ideas about the organization of society itself. For only
in that case will it be possible to apply what Dewey called intelligence to
social problems.
Free speech, then, free media of all kinds. However, the free exchange of
ideas is not enough; it must, and it does, lead to action. If that action is to
be peaceful, there must be freedom to form associations dedicated to chang-
ing some feature of society, small and large (societies for the protection of

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the right whale, Amnesty International, political parties, etc.). There must
also be mechanisms that enable individuals to replace their governors in
some peaceful and orderly way: fair elections; or a comparable procedure.
Where all mentally competent adults are able to participate in such a process
after being fully informed of the alternatives, we have a political democracy.
Fallibilism applied to social problems calls for political democracy as the
most suitable form of political organization. By political democracy I mean
at least universal suffrage, fair elections, a free press, and freedom of associa-
tion.
I want to make quite clear that this argument for political democracy is
not based on any metaphysical assumptions about the nature of individuals
or the goals they must have. I do not argue against dictatorships on the
grounds that they violate human autonomy or stifle the full development of
human capacities. Of course they do that, and, of course, I find that deplor-
able. Beyond that, dictatorships cause their victims unbearable physical and
emotional pain, and they do not hear the cries of their victims. In fact, they
make it nearly impossible for their victims to cry out. One does not need to
be a fallibilist, one does not need to believe in moral objectivity, to be op-
posed to institutionalized cruelty. But because they insist that all voices be
heard (that all the evidence must be considered), fallibilists oppose not only
malicious, oppressive, exploitative arrangements, but also any benevolent
system, if such there be, that is not democratic. Simply because such a sys-
tem would deprive itself of a means of selfcorrection. I do not, of course,
reject the moral arguments just alluded to; indeed I endorse them com-
pletely. I am, however, suggesting that they do not go far enough, that they
leave room for benevolent autocracies.
I also do not claim that my argument for democracy is value-free. The
argument takes it for granted that human beings prefer getting along with
each other to civil strife, and that they value some states of affairs that can be
achieved only by cooperation, thus that they value social arrangements that
foster cooperation. It also assumes (because otherwise the ideal of political
democracy could not be realized) that human beings want to have some say
in how matters are arranged in their societies. I am deliberately vague. Some
of us must want, or at least be willing, to be legislators, or judges, or execu-
tives on some level of government. Many of us must want, or at least be
willing, to be involved in some way in choosing these public agents. Some of
us, the more the better, must be willing to form informed opinions on mat-

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ters of public concern and to share these opinions with our representatives
on various levels of government. The machinery must allow for peaceful but
effective pressures to be applied.
In 1908 Dewey wrote, “Externally viewed, democracy is a piece of ma-
chinery, to be maintained or thrown away, like any other piece of machinery,
on the basis of its economy and efficiency of working. Morally, it is the ef-
fective embodiment of the moral ideal of a good which consists in the devel-
opment of all the social capacities of every individual member of society.”15
Externally viewed democracy is political democracy. But that machinery, as
does all machinery, serves some good. Included in that good is that the ma-
chinery must protect and maintain itself. John Rawls has taught us to think
about the stability of a social arrangement. A society that is just in the sense
of “justice as fairness,” he argued, would be stable. Living under such ar-
rangements would make one want to sustain them. But a Rawlsian just so-
ciety is more than a political democracy. It is a just society, and that means
that its basic principles rule out certain forms of oppression or exploitation
of one group of citizens by another. Rawls’s great contributions to political
philosophy are, in my opinion, his principles of justice. The first principle
spells out in greater depth what makes a political democracy a liberal democ-
racy. The second asserts, roughly, that a just policy would create inequalities,
or permit inequalities to continue, only if they are in the interest of the least
advantaged.16 I am, of course, aware of Rawls’s brilliant reconception of the
social contract; however, that kind of thought experiment does not fit into a
pragmatist argument. Of course, one should try to imagine, in as much de-
tail as possible, how various courses of action under consideration would
unfold, but that is a quite different kind of thought experiment from that
required by Rawls’s constructivism.
Let us, then, return to Dewey’s remark that, morally speaking, democracy
embodies the ideal of the development of all the social capacities of every
individual member of society. “All the social capacities” require a guaranteed
economic minimum. People who need to worry daily where their next meal
comes from, or where they will find shelter that night, or how to obtain
medical care without sinking into abject poverty—such people have neither

16. Rawls, Theory, 302.

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the time nor the strength to develop all their talents, or to participate in the
democratic process. Of course, much more could be and needs to be said
about social democracy, but space does not permit me to do so. Suffice it to
say that where there are very large differences in wealth and income and/or
where many are deprived of adequate schooling, the outcome of the political
process will be severely distorted in favor of the interests of the wealthy.
Social democracy is not an all or nothing affair. Some of the industrial
democracies are more egalitarian than others. Maintaining what social de-
mocracy we have and trying to expand it is an everlasting struggle. Richard
Rorty’s term “social hope” is useful here.17 We must begin with the hope that
we can achieve a social democracy and let that hope spur us to ever greater
effort.
There are, I said earlier, no intrinsic goods, no ends that are not subject to
revaluation. Yet one finds in the writings of James, and even more so of
Dewey, again and again an emphasis on individual growth, individual flour-
ishing. These expressions are so vague that fallibilism and reconsideration
will inevitably enter as we try to give them specific content. In any case, in-
dividual flourishing seems to be one of those transcultural goals that we can
all agree on, though, of course, what we mean by it will differ widely. It may
range from acceptance of a strict monastic rule to the pursuit of artistic ex-
cellence, from a modest life caring for one’s family to seeking the highest
political office, from a life devoted single-mindedly to an arcane research
project to a life of varied interests pursued with varied intensity. It may mean
faithful adherence to the lifestyle of one’s ancestors or an enthusiastic em-
brace of modernity. To provide genuine opportunity for all this flourishing,
society must make it possible for people to pursue varied lifestyles and mem-
bers of society must respect each other’s notion of flourishing. This is the
pluralism that William James argued for passionately in “On a Certain
Blindness in Human Beings.”18 He wrote of this essay that he wished he
could have made it “more impressive” and that it is connected to his “plural-
istic philosophy” according to which “the truth is too great for any one ac-
tual mind . . . to know the whole of it. . . . There is no point of view abso-
17. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999).
18. James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in Talks to Teachers on
Psychology, in Works, 10:132–149.

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lutely public and universal.”19 Pluralism, then, in the sense of respect for a
variety of lifestyles, as long as they are respectful of others, is the final ingre-
dient in the pragmatist wide conception of democracy. James spoke of toler-
ance, but I believe that tolerance is not enough, since tolerance is compatible
with disdain. One needs to be respected by those whom one respects in or-
der to have self-respect, and one needs self-respect in order to flourish.
19. James, Talks to Teachers, 4.

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27
Democracy as a Way of Life
Ruth Anna Putnam
AT THE OCCASION of a banquet in honor of his eightieth birthday in 1939,

John Dewey said, “We have had the habit of thinking of democracy as a
kind of political mechanism that will work as long as citizens were reason-
ably faithful in performing political duties.” But, he continued, this is not
enough; we must come to “realize in thought and act that democracy is a
personal way of individual life; that it signifies the possession and continual
use of certain attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire
and purpose in all the relations of life.”1
Democracy is a personal way of individual life. This is quite startling.
Even if we think of democracy as more than a political system, characterized
by universal suffrage, frequent elections, and majority rule, even if we think
of it as a set of values—rights of individuals; a commitment to pluralism; or
as liberty, equality, and fraternity—we think of democracy as a social phe-
nomenon; how can it be a personal way of individual life? Although this
characterization of democracy was recently mentioned both by James T.
Kloppenberg as well as by Robert B. Westbrook, they seem to me to be in-
sufficiently startled.2 Westbrook characterizes it as an appeal to a faith that is
1. Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task before Us,” in Later Works, 14:224–

230, 225–226.
2. Both in Morris Dickstein, ed., The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social
Thought, Law and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 100 and 137.

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required to strengthen whatever arguments for democracy Dewey gave or

might have given. So Westbrook mentions Dewey’s remark in the same ad-
dress, that democracy “is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith
in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for
intelligent judgments and action if proper conditions are furnished.”3
Kloppenberg uses Dewey’s remark as a reminder that for both Dewey and
James, democracy is a moral ideal, and points out that for both their com-
mitment to democracy is inseparable from their pragmatism.
Perhaps these authors are so steeped in Dewey’s thought that it is obvious to
them that for Dewey a certain personal way of individual life would necessarily
accompany a commitment, which is after all a personal thing, to democracy as
a social ideal or as the ideal form of a communal way of life. Indeed, two years
earlier Dewey had said of democracy, “It is, as we often say, though perhaps
without appreciating all that is involved in the saying, a way of life, social and
individual ” (emphasis added). What was startling in the remark with which I
began was the lack of any reference to the social. In contrast, the remark in the
1937 address continues as follows: “The key note of democracy as a way of life
may be expressed, it seems to me, as the necessity for the participation of every
mature human being in formation of the values that regulate the living of men
together—which is necessary from the standpoint of both the general welfare
and the full development of human beings as individuals.”4
“The participation of every mature human being in formation of the val-
ues that regulate the living of men together”—this is what democracy is all
about, and its justification rests precisely on this, that it “is necessary from
the standpoint of both the general welfare and the full development of hu-
man beings as individuals.” Note that Dewey does not say “from both the
standpoint of the general welfare and the standpoint of the full development
of human beings as individuals.” Dewey does not posit two goals; the gen-
eral welfare and the full development of all individuals are one and the same
thing. From his earliest writings on, Dewey rejects the assumption that there
is something problematic about the relation between individual and society,
that the individual’s good may conflict with that of society. What appears to
be such a conflict is instead a conflict between groups.
3. Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” in Later Works, 14:227.

4. Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration,” in The Later Works,
11:217–225, 217–218.

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DEMOCRACY AS A WAY OF LIFE 441
Thus he wrote in The Public and Its Problems, “An individual cannot be
opposed to the association of which he is an integral part nor can the associ-
ation be set against its integrated members. But groups may be opposed to
one another; and an individual as member of different groups may be di-
vided within himself, and in a true sense have a conflicting self. . . . In these
facts we have the grounds of the common antithesis set up between society
and the individual.”5
Nevertheless, one must emphasize sometimes collectivity and sometimes
individuality. For democracy is challenged from two sides: excessive individ-
ualism in the form of laissez-faire capitalism, on the one hand, and collectiv-
ism on the other. Laissez-faire capitalism, Dewey observed, tends in practice
to protect the freedom of the rich and the powerful at the expense of that of
the poor and the weak. Collectivism tends to block individual initiatives,
but these are necessary to social progress. For, he pointed out, “Minorities
are not always right; but every advance in right begins with a minority of
one, when some individual conceives a project which is at variance with the
social good as it has been established.”6 Social progress rests on the ability of
individuals to criticize the prevailing conception of the good. That ability
involves, again, both an individual and a social component. The individual
must have developed the capacity for intelligent judgment and the moral
courage and persistence to translate that judgment into intelligent action;
the society must provide the conditions in which these developments can
take place. Ultimately the individual must be able to challenge the prevailing
morality, must advance, in Dewey’s terminology, from customary to reflec-
tive morality. A brief excursion into Dewey’s moral philosophy is, therefore,
in order.
Dewey takes it that moral theories serve as aids to moral reflection, not as
algorithms that guide conduct. In the introduction to Essays in Experimental
Logic, Dewey wrote that “thinking would not exist, and hence knowledge
would not be found, in a world which presented no troubles.”7 As he was to
explain several decades later in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, inquiry begins in
a problematic situation, a situation in which it is not clear what is to be
5. Dewey, “The Public and Its Problems,” in Later Works, 2:236–373, 355.
6. John Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1908). I
quote from Dewey, Middle Works, 5:433.
7. John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic [1916] (New York: Dover, 1954), 19.

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done, but in which what we will do will affect the outcome.8 This is as true
in politics as it is in any other sphere of life. One of the outstanding charac-
teristics of Dewey’s pragmatism is his insistence that the same methods of
inquiry that have proved so successful in science and technology are to be
applied to moral and political problems. One’s first task in a problematic
situation is, however, not to wonder what is to be done but to formulate the
problem. If we are concerned, for example, about voter apathy, we begin by
asking why so many citizens fail to exercise their right to vote. Then we may
think that it is too difficult to register or that it is too difficult to actually get
to the voting places. If so, we will pass legislation that will make it easier to
register, and we will open more voting places, so that people can reach them
more easily, etc. Or we may think that many citizens believe that it will make
no difference to their lives which candidate wins. If so, and if we think that
these people are mistaken, we will seek ways of publicizing the differences
between the candidates. If, on the other hand, we believe the apathetic vot-
ers are correct in their belief that there is no significant difference between
the candidates, we realize that our democracy is in deep trouble; I shall
forebear pursuing this line of thought. The example shows, I trust, that for-
mulating the problem is, in fact, the first step toward saying what is to be
done.
Having formulated the problem, one envisages a solution, an end-in-
view. I suggested with my example above that while the end-in-view might
be described as seeing a higher percentage of eligible voters casting their
ballots, after the problem has been formulated, a more concrete formulation
of the end-in-view is possible; for example, in the second case it would be
better informed citizens. There are for Dewey no ready-made ends, no a
priori goods, though there are, of course, things one wants for their own
sakes. It may also be worth noting that there are things one wants not as
solutions to problems, but just so—to listen to a Brandenburg Concerto, to
walk at the seashore and watch the sunset. Without such consummatory
experiences, as Dewey calls them, one’s life would be deeply impoverished.
But moral reflection, whether it concerns private or public matters, begins
in a problematic situation, and when an end-in-view has been formulated, is
wanted as a solution to the problem and will actually function as a guide to
8. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry [1938], in Later Works, vol. 12.

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further reflection. For when one begins to ask oneself how that end-in-view
may be realized, one begins to identify resources and obstacles. In the course
of such thinking one may well come to modify or even replace the end-in-
view with which one began. Thus the familiar means-ends distinction col-
lapses, but as with other dualisms that Dewey rejects, one should understand
that the dualism is replaced by a continuum, and continua have end points.
Just as it is difficult to think of watching a sunset as a means, so it was for
Dewey impossible to think of the machinery of political democracy as an
end. He saw it as merely the best means yet thought of toward realizing the
social ideal. Finally, and simply for the sake of completeness, I mention that
the settled situation that constitutes the successful solution to the problem,
the end-in-view that has been realized and thus constitutes an ending, will
itself prove to be the setting, sooner or later, for new troubles. In this sense,
too, there is a means-ends continuum.
Although Dewey was keenly interested in what he called the construction
of the good, and in the theory of valuation, he did not think of the moral life
as a string of disconnected episodes in which a problematic situation is trans-
formed into a settled one, which settled situation will sooner or later, generally
sooner, turn out to be itself problematic. He emphasized again and again that
our actions are continuous, that what might appear as meaningless routine or
as morally neutral derives its significance from the fact that it is a link in a
chain of actions that make up what he called conduct and William James
called a significant life. Our actions do not merely form a causal chain leading
to some end or other; that could be said of a sequence of operations performed
by robots on an assembly line. What links a chain of actions together is that
they are the actions of one person, and both James and Dewey emphasized
that every one of one’s actions leaves its mark on one’s character, strengthens
one’s virtues or one’s vices, or in rare cases enables one to become, as we say, a
“new person.” Thus Dewey wrote, “Sometimes a juncture is so critical that a
person, in deciding upon what course he will take, feels that his future, his very
being, is at stake. . . . What is conscious in these momentous cases is found in
every voluntary decision.”9
When we apply Dewey’s account of moral reasoning to reflection con-
cerning political and social issues, we see that he described matters well
9. Dewey, Ethics, rev. ed., in Later Works, 7:171.

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when he said to an audience of Chinese students that his theory sought

“particular kinds of solutions by particular methods, for particular problems
that arise on particular occasions.”10 Nevertheless, Dewey did not altogether
eschew general theoretical considerations.
It is, in fact, tempting to say that everything Dewey wrote directly, or
indirectly, served, as he put it in China, “to foment democracy.” Even if one
restricts oneself to Dewey’s explicitly social or political writings, the wealth
of material is overwhelming. I have simply selected, and will now offer with-
out apology, certain of these writings to develop the idea of democracy first
as a social ideal and then as a personal way of individual life.
Dewey’s commitment to democracy antedates his pragmatism. As Robert
Westbrook points out, Dewey’s first sustained philosophical defense of de-
mocracy, his 1888 essay “The Ethics of Democracy,” was written under the
influence of the British idealist T. H. Green.11 It is a sustained defense of
democracy against Sir Henry Maine’s elitist arguments in favor of aristocracy
and against the latter’s dire prediction that democracy is unstable and will
inevitably lead to despotism. Yet, from a pragmatist perspective, Dewey’s
arguments in this essay are as “abstract,” as much what he later castigated as
“dialectical manipulation of concepts,” as is the reasoning he ascribes to
Maine. Nevertheless, I mention this essay not only as a historical curiosity
but because one can find already at this early date the roots of Dewey’s later
thinking about democracy and about individuals. Thus he rejects the view
that democracy is merely a form of government, holding, “Democracy, in a
word, is a social, that is to say, an ethical conception, and upon its ethical
significance is based its significance as governmental. Democracy is a form
of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.”12
Again, Dewey already rejects the atomistic individualism familiar from
English political philosophy—the view, as he put it later in The Public and
Its Problems, that since we can conceive of a human being as not standing in
this or that particular relationship, we can conceive of a human being as
standing in no relationship at all.13
10. John Dewey, Lectures in China, 1919–1920, ed. Robert W. Clopton and Tsuin
Chen Ou (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1973), 53.
11. Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” in Early Works, 1:227–249.
12. Ibid., 240.
13. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, in Later Works, 2:191.

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In accord with other absolute idealists, Dewey conceived of society as an

organism, indeed as “a more perfect organism [than an animal]. The whole
lives truly in every member, and there is no longer the appearance of physical
aggregation, or continuity. The organism manifests itself as what it truly is, an
ideal or spiritual life, a unity of will.”14 Ideally, then, each individual embodies
the whole society; all share a conception of the common good and each wills
that good. Of course, in practice, society consists of a variety of groups with
conflicting interests. Yet to the extent that there is a common purpose, to that
extent that common purpose is the purpose of each individual member.
If so, one might argue, would that common purpose not be accomplished
more surely and more expeditiously if it were entrusted to a wise and benev-
olent aristocracy? Dewey responds, “The ethical ideal is not satisfied merely
when all men sound the note of harmony with the highest social good, so be
it that they have not worked it out for themselves.”15 What makes society, in
Dewey’s eyes, the ideal type of organism is precisely that, when democrati-
cally organized, it makes ethical individualism possible. And what is ethical
individualism, this “highest ethical idea which humanity has yet reached”?
“It is the idea that personality is the one thing of permanent and abiding
worth, and that in every human individual there lies personality.”16 In other
words, Dewey’s abiding faith in the potential of each human being to de-
velop into a responsible, reflective moral agent serves as the ground for his
argument. While recognizing the biological basis of all human development,
he held that the differences between human beings are culturally deter-
mined. Biologically, we have the capacity to learn a language; the human
beings in whose company we grow up determine the language we actually
speak as our first language. So, too, we acquire a morality, which he called
the customary morality, from our human surroundings, but whether we
learn to be critical of that very morality or, in other words, whether we can
be said to own or disown various of its features deliberately, depends on
whether we are given the opportunity to reflect, and in public matters that
means to participate in the construction of the common good. I have antic-
ipated in this reformulation the arguments of later Deweyan views, but in
the context of this essay that seems to me appropriate.
14. Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” in Early Works, 1:237.

15. Ibid., 243.
16. Ibid., 244.

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It would be out of place here to subject “The Ethics of Democracy” to

detailed critique. After all, we know that Dewey abandoned absolute ide-
alism soon thereafter. I find the essay of interest because it foreshadows,
though in unfamiliar garb, Dewey’s mature views, including, near the end
of the essay, his awareness that the enormous economic gulf between so-
cial classes that existed then and still exists today distorted political and
social democracy and deprived the poor of the possibility of full moral
development. The aim, he wrote, was to come to understand that “the
economic and industrial life is in itself ethical, that it is to be made con-
tributory to the realization of personality through the formation of a
higher and more complete unity among men, this is what we do not rec-
ognize; but such is the meaning of the statement that democracy must
become industrial.”17
Twenty years later, Dewey reiterated in more familiar language and in
much more detail certain features of his earlier view. He wrote, “Externally
viewed, democracy is a piece of machinery, to be maintained or thrown
away, like any other piece of machinery, on the basis of economy and effi-
ciency of working. Morally, it is the effective embodiment of the moral ideal
of a good which consists in the development of all the social capacities of
every individual member of society.”18 Therefore he applies the following
moral criterion to public policies and institutions. “The test is whether a
given custom or law sets free individual capacities in such a way as to make
them available for the common good. This formula states the test with the
emphasis falling upon the side of the individual. It may be stated from the
side of associated life as follows: The test is whether the general, the public,
organization and order are promoted in such a way as to equalize opportu-
nity for all.”19 What is striking here is that while Dewey has abandoned the
language of self-realization (in an earlier chapter of Ethics he had warned
against certain misunderstandings of that term), he did not abandon the
idea provided that it was understood as the full development of one’s capac-
ities in a manner that would not limit the equal opportunity of others to
develop their capacities, all this to make one’s own and everyone else’s capac-
ities available for the common good.
17. Ibid., 248.

18. Dewey, Ethics [1908], in Middle Works, 5:424.
19. Ibid., 431.

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But what is that common good? Our earlier discussion should warn us
against seeking a general characterization. The common good, we should
perhaps say, consists of all the particular solutions to particular problems as
these arise. But one cannot help concluding, when one reads Dewey, that for
him “conditions that make the flourishing of all possible” is a preferred de-
scription of the common good. However, Dewey would respond that that
characterization is so abstract it can at best serve to formulate a problem.
It should thus come as no surprise that the particular form in which
Dewey contributed to the creation of these conditions consisted in his work
on education. Hilary Putnam and I have discussed Dewey’s philosophy of
education in “Education for Democracy.”20 We called attention there to
Dewey’s aim, one of the characteristic aims of pragmatism, to overcome
dualisms—the dualisms between mind and body, between theory and prac-
tice, between fact and value. These dualisms, in Dewey’s view, all reflect the
social dualisms of master and slave, of bosses and workers, of rich and poor.
Education, as Dewey understands it, would overcome these dualisms by
eradicating the barriers between socioeconomic classes, between rulers and
ruled. To be sure education is the method by which society reproduces itself,
but for Dewey that reproduction is at the same time a reconstruction, a re-
construction both of the individual’s experience and of society. The child
should not simply learn facts, nor should values or virtuous habits be simply
instilled in the learner. In the Deweyan scheme
learning is the accompaniment of continuous activities or occupations which

have a social aim and utilize the material of typical social situations. . . . All
education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral. It
forms a character which not only does the particular deed socially necessary
but one which is interested in that continuous readjustment which is essential
to growth. Interest in learning from all the contacts of life is the essential
moral interest.21
Taking Dewey seriously means taking the context in which he wrote seri-
ously. It is worth noting that for most of Dewey’s life the opposition to de-
20. Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, “Education for Democracy,” in Words
and Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 221–244.
21. Dewey, Democracy and Education, in Middle Works, 9:370.

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mocracy, or to particular features of political democracy, came from those

who advocated some form of aristocracy or elitism. Appealing to the
Deweyan notion that intelligence should be applied to the solution of social
problems, democratic realists attacked two beliefs on which democracy was
founded. In Westbrook’s words, “Finding ordinary men and women irratio-
nal and participatory democracy impossible and unwise under present con-
ditions, they argued that it was best to strictly limit government by the peo-
ple and to redefine democracy as, by and large, government for the people
by enlightened and responsible elites.”22 This was, of course, essentially the
position defended by Sir Henry Maine in the 1880s. And Dewey’s response
was also essentially the same, only now in the terminology of pragmatism
and in much greater detail. I refer, of course, to his The Public and Its
Problems. Alas, it would require another and different essay to do justice to
this work. Here I want to call attention only to his explicit reply to the attack
just mentioned.
The critics of democracy acknowledge, Dewey holds, that the historical
events that transferred power from a landed and hereditary aristocracy to an
oligarchy also led to the enfranchisement of the masses. But since the masses
lack the capacity to rule intelligently, rule by expert intellectuals is to be
preferred. Dewey replies, “A class of experts is inevitably so removed from
common interests as to become a class with private interests and private
knowledge, which in social matters is not knowledge at all. The ballot is, as
often said, a substitute for bullets. But what is more significant is that count-
ing of heads compels prior recourse to methods of discussion, consultation
and persuasion.”23 And so he concludes, “The essential need, in other words,
is the improvement of methods and conditions of debate, discussion and
persuasion.”24 Experts are needed to provide knowledge of facts, but the
public needs to be able to judge the import of these facts on matters of pub-
lic concern. And Dewey believes that given information instead of propa-
ganda and the sort of education discussed above, the public will prove equal
to that task. Conversely, undertaking the task is itself educative.
The problematic situation that the democracies faced by the time of
22. Robert W. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1991), 282.
23. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, in Later Works, 2:364–365.
24. Ibid.

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Dewey’s eightieth birthday was rather different. The enemies of democracy

were no longer benevolent though misguided intellectuals but powerful dic-
tators. It was that situation which provoked his calling democracy a personal
individual way of life, noting that “powerful present enemies of democracy
can be met only by the creation of personal attitudes in individual human
beings . . . attitudes so deep-seated as to constitute personal character.”
Denouncing Nazism was rank insincerity, he held, unless in one’s personal
life, in all one’s relations to other people, one demonstrated a faith in human
potentialities “in every human being irrespective of race, color, sex, birth and
family, of material or cultural wealth.” Neither the faith nor its declaration
are new. Dewey remarks ruefully that he has often been accused of having
too much faith in human intelligence and the effectiveness of education.
But, he responds, this faith is not his invention; he learned it from his sur-
roundings. For faith in democratic institutions is “faith in the capacity of the
intelligence of the common man to respond with commonsense to the free
play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free in-
quiry, free assembly and free communication?”25
Dewey had always insisted on the importance of free communication, on
the importance of freedom of speech if there is to be freedom of opinion; he
now emphasizes that legal guarantees of civil liberties is not enough.
Intolerance and the mutual suspicion, fear, and hatred it breeds “destroy the
essential conditions of the democratic way of living even more effectually
than open coercion which—as the example of totalitarian states proves—is
effective only when it succeeds in breeding hate, suspicion, intolerance in
the minds of individual human beings.”26 Finally, Dewey adds, democracy as
a way of life fosters a habit of cooperation, of seeking accommodation, of
listening to one another rather than suppressing the other’s voice, which, he
points out, does violence to the other even if the means are psychological
rather than physical. Listening not only respects the other’s right but it also
enriches one’s own experience.
Thus Dewey has led us to one of the key concepts of his pragmatism—ex-
perience. Experience, to put it very simply, is for Dewey not something that
goes on in the mind, it is not a veil between us and reality, it is rather an
25. Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” in Later Works, 14:226–227.

26. Ibid., 228.

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interaction between the organism and its environment, and, especially when
deliberately produced (as in a scientific experiment), it reveals rather than
conceals nature. In the context of his reflections concerning democracy as a
way of life, Dewey offers the following account:
Democracy is belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims

and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness. . . .
Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than
any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value
only as they are used to enrich and order the process. Since the process of
experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with
faith in experience and education.27
We recognize in the last three words the title of Dewey’s last book in the
philosophy of education, published just one year before. And in this context,
the context of stating his democratic faith in philosophical terms, Dewey
defines experience as “that free interaction of individual human beings with
surrounding conditions, especially human surroundings, which develops
and satisfies need and desire by increasing knowledge of things as they are.”28
Throughout his life, Dewey had an abiding faith in science—not so much
in particular discoveries, but in the methods of science and in its habit of
taking its discoveries as hypotheses. Indeed Dewey urged policy makers, and
that means ultimately every citizen, to view political and social programs
and policies in that same hypothetical light. Quite late in his life—one
stands in awe at the sheer wealth of philosophy that Dewey produced be-
tween age seventy-five and age eighty—Dewey published his Logic: The
Theory of Inquiry, which Westbrook characterizes, rightly, as “a magisterial
summing up and refinement of some forty years of his work in the theory of
knowledge.”29 Since Dewey rejected what usually goes by that name—the
endless and endlessly futile dance of skeptics with realists—and replaced it
deliberately by a theory of inquiry, his reference to experience as “increasing
knowledge of things as they are” is particularly noteworthy. It was prompted
by reflection on the pernicious influence of misinformation in modern dic-
27. Ibid., 229.

28. Ibid.
29. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 496–497.

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tatorships. As he noted in Freedom and Culture, “[science] has put at the

disposal of dictators means of controlling public opinion and sentiment of a
potency which reduces to a mere shadow all previous agencies at the com-
mand of despotic rulers.”30 As the result of constant daily bombardment
with propaganda and “alleged information,” modern totalitarian states can
claim to rest on “the consent of the governed.” One cannot think of a greater
perversion of democracy than the “elections” staged by Hitler and other
dictators in which virtually every citizen goes to the polls and virtually every
ballot is cast for the dictator. Thus, Dewey continues in his birthday address,
“Knowledge of conditions as they are is the only solid ground for communi-
cation and sharing; all other communication means the subjection of some
persons to the personal opinions of other persons. Need and desire—out of
which grow purpose and direction of energy—go beyond what exists, and
hence beyond knowledge, beyond science. They continually open up the
way into the unexplored and unattained future.”31 But surely, Dewey mis-
spoke when he said that all communication other than that of condition is
subject to the opinion of others. Dewey knew very well that we must share
our aspirations and dreams as well as our knowledge of present conditions as
these are relevant to those dreams and aspirations. The minority of one who
can envisage a better social world can only bring about a reconstruction of
the social world if he or she is able to communicate that vision and win
others over to it. Indeed, while not offering a correction, he concluded the
address on a more expansive note: “Since it is one that can have no end until
experience itself comes to an end, the task of democracy is forever that of
creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to
which all contribute.”32
Dewey came to see democracy as a personal way of individual life when
he asked himself how the totalitarianisms of Europe could have arisen. How
could democracy have collapsed into despotisms just as Sir Henry Maine
had predicted? In particular, how could the enlightened liberal Weimar
Republic be transformed into the hate-filled racist Nazi dictatorship? Of
course, Dewey would never ask the question that way. He did not look back-
ward; he looked forward. He would have asked how we in the United States
30. Dewey, Freedom and Culture, in Later Works, 13:156.

31. Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” in Later Works, 14:229.
32. Ibid., 230.

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of America could make sure that we do not suffer a similar collapse. And the
answer is clear: democratic political institutions are not enough—they had
those in Germany. Finding particular solutions to particular problems as
Roosevelt’s New Deal did was not enough—too many Americans continued
to be excluded from the American dream and their potential contributions
to the common good went unused and unappreciated. What was needed
was a fundamental change in attitudes. Because what was most horrifying
about the Nazis was their intolerance, Dewey emphasized tolerance. Yet he
might equally well have emphasized experimentalism in social affairs as op-
posed to all forms of dogmatism or, finally, the courage to be a minority of
one.

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Appendix
Works Cited
Acknowledgments
Index

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A PPENDI X
Other Works on Pragmatism by Hilary

Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam
HIL ARY PUTNAM
Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990:
Ch. 17: “James’s Theory of Perception,” 232–251.
Ch. 18: “Peirce the Logician,” 252–260.
“A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy.” In Renewing Philosophy. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, 180–202.
Words and Life. Edited by James Conant. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1994:
Ch. 8: “Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity,” 151–181.
Ch. 9: “Pragmatism and Relativism: Universal Values and Traditional
Ways of Life,” 182–197.
Ch. 10: “Dewey’s Logic: Epistemology as Hypothesis” (with Ruth Anna
Putnam) [1990], 198–220.
Pragmatism: An Open Question. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995:
Ch. 1: “The Permanence of William James,” 5–26.
Ch. 2: “Was Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?” 27–56.
Ch. 3: “Pragmatism and the Contemporary Debate,” 57–81.
“Pragmatism Resurgent: A Reading of The American Evasion of Philosophy.” In Cornel
West: A Critical Reader, ed. George Yancy. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, 19–37.

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456 APPENDIX
Ethics without Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004:

Part 2.1: “The Three Enlightenments,” 89–108.
Part 2.2: “Skepticism about Enlightenment,” 109–129.
“The Uniqueness of Pragmatism.” Think: Philosophy for Everyone 8 (Autumn 2004):
89–106.
“Intelligence and Ethics.” In A Companion to Pragmatism, ed. John R. Shook and
Joseph Margolis. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006, 267–277.
RUTH ANNA PUTNAM
“William James and Our Moral Lives.” In Frontiers in American Philosophy, vol. 1, ed.
Robert W Burch and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 1992.
“Dewey, John.” In A Companion to Metaphysics, ed. Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995.
“Some of Life’s Ideals.” In The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth
Anna Putnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 282–299.
“Review of Christopher Hookway, Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism: Themes from
Peirce.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (2001).
HIL ARY PUTNAM AND RUTH ANNA PUTNAM
“William James’s Ideas.” In Realism with a Human Face, 217–231.

“Dewey’s Logic: Epistemology as Hypothesis.” In Words and Life, 198–220.
“Education for Democracy.” In Words and Life, 221–241.

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ACK NOW L EDGM EN TS
Chapter 1, “Taking Pragmatism Seriously”: James Conant and Urszula M. Zeglen,

eds., Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism (London: Routledge, 2002), 7–13.
Chapter 2, “Pragmatism and Verificationism”: “Pragmatism,” Proceedings of the

Aristotelian Society 95, no. 3 (March 1995): 291–306. Reprinted courtesy of the
Editor of the Aristotelian Society: © 1995 by the Aristotelian Society.
Chapter 3, “What Makes Pragmatism So Different?” Poznan Studies in the Philosophy

of the Sciences and the Humanities 95, no. 1 (2008): 19–34.
Chapter 4, “Pragmatism and Nonscientific Knowledge”: James Conant and Urszula

M. Zeglen, eds., Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism (London: Routledge, 2002),
14–24.
Chapter 5, “Weaving Seamless Webs”: Philosophy 62 (1987): 207–220.
Chapter 6, “Rorty’s Vision: Philosophical Courage and Social Hope”: originally ti-
tled: “Democracy without Foundations,” Ethics 110, no. 2 (2000): 388–404.
Chapter 7, “Reflections on the Future of Pragmatism”: John J. Stuhr, ed., 100 years of
Pragmatism: William James’s Revolutionary Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2010), 185–193.

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466 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Chapter 8, “Was James a Pragmatist?” appears for the first time in this volume.
Chapter 9, “Pragmatism and Realism”: Cardozo Law Review 18, no. 153 (1996): 153–170.
Chapter 10, “What the Spilled Beans Can Spell: The Difficult and Deep Realism of
William James”: The Times Literary Supplement, no. 4864 (21 June 1996): 14–15.
Chapter 11, “James’s Theory of Truth”: Ruth Anna Putnam, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 166–
185. © 1997 Cambridge University Press.
Chapter 12, “James on Truth (Again)”: Jeremy R. Carrette, ed., William James and
the Varieties of Religious Experience: A Centenary Celebration (London: Routledge,
2005), 172–182.
Chapter 13, “James’s Philosophical Friendships, 1902–1905”: Introduction to

William James, The Correspondence of William James, vol. 10: 1902–March 1905, ed.
Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 2002), xxv–xlviii.
Chapter 14, “What James’s Pragmatism Offers Us: A Reading of the First Chapter of
Pragmatism”: Scopus: Casopis za filozofiju stendenata Hravarkih studija [Zagreb,
Croatia] 11, no. 24 (2007): 7–12.
Chapter 15, “Varieties of Experience and Pluralities of Perspective”: Jeremy R.

Carrette, ed., William James and the Varieties of Religious Experience: A Centenary
Celebration (London: Routledge, 2005), 172–182.
Chapter 16, “William James on Religion”: Chad Meister and Paul Copan, eds., The
Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion (London: Routledge, 2007), 181–190.
Chapter 17, “The Real William James”: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 34,
no. 2 (Spring 1998): 366–381.
Chapter 18, “Dewey’s Central Insight”: first published as “Intelligence and Ethics” in
John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis, eds., A Companion to Pragmatism (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006), 267–277. © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Chapter 19, “Dewey’s Epistemology”: Molly Cochran, ed., The Cambridge

Companion to Dewey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 34–54. ©
2010 Cambridge University Press.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 467
Chapter 20, “Dewey’s Faith”: John R. Shook and Paul Kurtz, eds., Dewey’s Enduring
Impact (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2011), 181–192.
Chapter 21, “Philosophy as a Reconstructive Activity: William James on Moral

Philosophy,” Michael Egginton and Mike Sandbothe, eds., The Pragmatic Turn in
Philosophy: Contemporary Engagements between Analytic and Continental Thought
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 31–46.
Chapter 22, “The Moral Impulse”: Morris Dickstein, ed., The Revival of Pragmatism:
New Essays in Social Thought, Law, and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1998), 62–71. Copyright © 1998 by Morris Dickstein. All rights reserved.
Republished by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.
www.dukeupress.edu
Chapter 23, “The Moral Life of a Pragmatist”: Owen Flanagan and Amélie Rorty,
eds., Identity, Character and Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 67–89.
Chapter 24, “Creating Facts and Values”: Philosophy 60 (1985): 187–204.
Chapter 25, “Perceiving Facts and Values”: Philosophy 73 (1998): 5–19.
Chapter 26, “Democracy and Value Inquiry”: Shook and Margolis, eds., A
Companion to Pragmatism, 278-289.
Chapter 27, “Democracy as a Way of Life”: Larry A. Hickman and Guiseppe

Spadafora, eds., John Dewey’s Educational Philosophy in International Perspective: A
New Democracy for the Twenty-First Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2009), 36–47. © 2009 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois
University.
Note
David Macarthur would like to thank Philippa Byers and Benard Owuondo for their
help in formatting the original papers for the present volume.

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Abduction, 19, 391 Boyd, Richard, 403

Anderson, Elizabeth, 110 Bradley, Francis Herbert, 203, 210, 214–215, 231
Anti-essentialism, 47, 268 Brutus, 400–404
Antifoundationalism, 93, 270–271
Antirealism: Dewey and, 308–309; James and, Caesar, Julius, 197, 400–402
4–5, 140–142; realism and, 140–142, Caird, Edward, 212
150, 156; Rorty and, 59. See also Realism Capitalism, 104, 325, 441
Antireductionism, 164. See also Reductionism Carnap, Rudolf, 22, 40–41, 56, 114
Antisemitism, 86, 375 Carpenter, Rhys, 396
Apriorism, 4, 49, 279 Cartesian philosophy, 90, 151–153, 160, 176,
Arieti, Silvano, 391 275; doubt, 15–17
Aristotle, 36, 45–46, 49, 63, 85, 145–147, Causal connections, 148–150, 165, 358
159, 272, 299–300; De Anima, 146 Cavell, Stanley, 53
Artists, 390–397, 404 Chesterton, G. K., 227
Atheism, 52, 114, 234, 255, 260 Chisholm, Roderick, 339
Austin, John L., 15, 114, 147, 153, 156–157, Churchman, C. West, 19, 20
274; Sense and Sensibilia, 156–158 Classical pragmatism, 1–11, 21, 273–274. See
Ayer, A. J.: Language, Truth and Logic, 20 also Pragmatism
Common good, 283–284, 288, 291, 445–448,
Beans, cast of, 48, 161–163, 191, 212 452
Bentham, Jeremy, 279, 283–288, 290 Concepts: conceptual analysis, 29–30; con-
Bergson, Henri, 202–208; Matière et Mémoire, ceptual connection, 26, 29–35, 62–63;
203 conceptual truth, 29–34, 102, 171. See
Berkeley, Elizabeth M., 203, 216, 277 also Truth
Book of the Dead, The, 58 Conjunctive experiences, 176, 182
Borden, Lizzie, 186, 198 Conscious self, 244–245, 253

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Contemporary pragmatism, 2–3. See also on religion, 314–327; on sympathy,

Pragmatism 288–290; on theory of knowledge, 213,
Courage, 87–107 278–279, 293–305, 312, 450; “Theory of
Culture: differences, 97–100; idioms of, 396; the Moral Life,” 431; Theory of Valua-
incommensurability of, 58, 78, 85; pres- tion, 424; on truth, 124, 136, 296–297;
ervation of, 98; relativism, 68, 85, 383, on utilitarianism, 279–288, 376–377,
387; Rorty on, 58–59 432–433; on valuings, 65–67, 408, 424;
on “warranted assertibility,” 66, 296–297,
Darwin, Charles, 46–47, 159, 373; survival of 347–348; “What I Believe,” 325
fittest, 100, 406 Direct realism, 5, 140–141, 147–156, 265,
Davidson, Donald, 39, 45, 148 271–275. See also Realism
Democracy: Dewey on, 292, 315, 321–327, Disquotational principle, 91, 198–199, 347
421–452; James on, 421–438; moral Dogmatism, 106, 115, 452
values and, 329, 331–452; Rorty on, Dretske, Fred, 69
421–422; value inquiry and, 421–438; as
way of life, 8, 439–452 Earle, William James, 228
Descartes, René, 16, 124, 146–147, 161, 277, Education, philosophy of, 447, 450
409 Einstein, Alfred, 56–60, 301
Dewey, John: antirealism and, 308–309; Eliot, George, 364
Aristotelianism and, 46; on classical Empiricism: classical empiricism, 49–50, 165,
empiricism, 50, 276, 279–280; Common 206, 276, 279–280; radical empiricism,
Faith, A, 315, 321–322, 327; “Con- 44, 108, 128, 136–143, 152–176, 201–
struction of Good, The,” 282, 291; on 202, 216, 235, 248, 253, 297, 355–359;
criticism, 65; Critique of Pure Reason, The, sensationalism, 277–278, 280–281, 356;
46; on democracy, 292, 315, 321–327, traditional empiricism, 8, 49, 158, 165,
421–452; Democracy and Education, 206, 216, 276; truth, 29–30
110; epistemology of, 293–313; Essays Enlightenment, 4–5, 8, 17, 94–95, 380, 389
in Experimental Logic, 297–298, 305, Essentialism, 47, 145–146, 268
441; Essays in Radical Empiricism, 44, Ethics: claims, 61–69; “critical moments,”
143, 152, 160–161, 172, 175, 253, 297, 366–369, 373–374, 382–383; natural-
355–356; on ethical claims, 61; faith of, ism, 163
314–327; Ethics, 279–282, 446; “Ethics of Ethnocentrism, 92, 100–104
Democracy, The,” 444, 446; Freedom and Evil, problem of, 111–112, 246, 259, 314
Culture, 451; friendships of, 202; Human Evolution: cultural evolution, 100–101; idea
Nature and Conduct, 14, 46; insight of, of, 100–101; psychology of, 288–289;
276–292; introduction to, 1–9, 13–20; of society, 340; study of, 46–47, 114;
Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 20, 441, 450; survival of fittest and, 100, 406; theory
on moral life, 360–365, 372, 376–377, of, 118, 295
430–433; on morality, 116, 331–358, Existentialism, 36–37, 51–54
360–365, 372, 376–377, 425–427, 441; Experience: human experience, 66, 115–116,
on perception, 302–306, 408–420; on 217–218, 255–259, 421, 450; “impres-
philosophy, 14–15, 65–67, 109–116, sions,” 144–148, 161, 176, 185; nonve-
302–313, 331–358; on pleasure, 284–291; ridical experience, 157–158, 274
“Postulate of Immediate Empiricism, The,” Experimentalism, 5–6, 164, 229, 452
302; on pragmatism, 2–4, 8, 13–14, 89,
124–127, 130–131; “Problem of Evil, Facts: creating, 385–404; judgments of,
The,” 314; Public and Its Problems, The, 60–70, 311–312; moral facts, 385–404;
441, 444, 448; Quest for Certainty, The, 50, perceiving, 64–65, 405–420; theories
276, 278–281, 293, 322; Reconstruction and, 391–393
in Philosophy, 14, 331; “Reconstruction as Faith, 233–243, 248–260, 314–327. See also
Seen Twenty-Five Years Later,” 331–332; Religion

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Fallibilism: commitment to, 25, 118–119; 216–217; pragmatism and, 2–3, 216–217
James and, 132, 136, 165, 192–193, 196, Intersubjectivity, 343, 362, 429–430
229, 235, 381, 383–384, 429; Peirce and,
25, 64; skepticism and, 132, 136; social James, Henry, 371
problems and, 433–437; understanding, James, William: on alternative medicine,
5, 51, 64 14–15; antirealism and, 4–5, 140–142;
Fanaticism, 106, 422, 433 “cast of beans,” 48, 161–163, 191, 212;
Fascism, 79, 85–86, 404 as cofounder of pragmatism, 124, 296;
Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 257–259 on democracy, 421–438; “Dilemma of
Feminism, 87, 100–102, 105–106, 115–119 Determinism, The,” 129, 263; “Doctrine
Flournoy, Theodore, 108 of Necessity Examined, The,” 129; falli-
Fodor, Jerry, 29–30, 69 bilism and, 132, 136, 165, 192–193, 196,
Foot, Philippa, 377 229, 235, 381, 383–384, 429; “Feelings,
Frege, Gottlob, 27, 207, 221, 346 The,” 143–145; friendships of, 201–224;
Freud, Sigmund, 20 introduction to, 1–9, 13–20; Meaning
Fromm, Erich, 397–398 of Truth, The, 128, 135, 137, 168, 172,
182–183, 235–236, 345; moral impulse
Gallison, Peter, 61 of, 261–265, 349–359; on moral life,
Gauguin, Paul, 7, 364, 368–370, 375 360–384, 430–431; “Moral Philosopher
Genocide, 94, 96 and the Moral Life,” 162–163, 191, 242,
Gifford Lectures, 201, 238, 242, 246–248, 262, 333, 341, 365, 377–378, 405; on
276 morality, 52–53, 116, 162–163, 191–193,
Global supervenience, 42–45 242, 262, 331–358, 360–384; on per-
God: pantheism, 255–257, 260; reality of, ception, 408–420; on philosophy, 14–16,
129–130 52–53, 109–110, 162–163, 191–193,
Goldman, Alvin, 59 225–231, 261–265, 331–358; on plural-
Goodman, Nelson, 210, 390–395, 397; Ways ism, 116–119, 136–137, 164–165, 179,
of Worldmaking, 210, 390, 393 337, 437–439; Pluralistic Universe, A,
Green, T. H., 212, 215–217, 444 205–208, 233–234, 248–249, 253–255,
349; Portrait of a Lady, 364, 371; Pragma-
Habermas, Jurgen, 344–346 tism, 160, 162, 163, 165; on pragmatism,
Habits of action, 35, 97–98, 197 2–4, 8, 14–15, 21–23, 35, 89, 108–114,
Hadot, Pierre, 226 123–140, 225–260; 167, 182–183;
Hanson, N. R.: Patterns of Discovery, 394 “Pragmatism and Humanism,” 163; Prag-
Harris, Roy, 396 matism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of
Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 276 Thinking, 123, 211, 225–231, 233–234,
Heidegger, Martin, 51–52, 120 245, 248, 254–255, 324, 342, 376;
Herman, Barbara, 291 “Pragmatism and Religion,” 163, 245;
Hibbert Lectures, 206, 253 “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” 175;
Hickman, Larry, 110 “Present Situation in Philosophy, The,”
Hitler, Adolf, 341, 451 253; Principles of Psychology, The, 142–143,
Holocaust, 96, 115 154, 237, 258, 355, 365, 377, 406, 412;
Hookway, Christopher, 128–129, 221–223 Psychology: The Briefer Course, 143, 160;
Hope, 87–107 on radical empiricism, 44, 128, 136–143,
Human nature, 63, 101–102, 239, 392–393 152–176, 201–202, 216, 235, 248, 253,
Human rights culture, 94–96 297, 355–359; on realism, 140–166;
Hume, David, 15, 165, 216, 277 “Reflex Action and Theism,” 206, 249; on
Husserl, Edmund, 49, 51, 143 religion, 232–260, 316, 324; “Remarks on
Idealism: absolute idealism, 111, 187, Spencer’s Definition of Mind,” 124, 130;
209–219, 231, 248, 254–263, 299, 314, response to Meyers, 261–275; “Sentiment
346, 445–446; German idealism, 2–3, of Rationality, The,” 172, 249, 270; on

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skepticism, 358–360; Talks to Teachers on Maine, Sir Henry, 444, 448, 451
Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Marx, Karl, 20, 102
Ideals, 116–117, 235, 359; on truth, 128, Marxism, 84, 104, 117
134–137, 167–200, 265–266, 341–347; Materialism, 36–40, 50–51, 229, 254–256
Varieties of Religious Experience, 14, 160, Mathematical theories, 301–302
188, 201–202, 232–259, 316; on “war- Mayr, Ernst, 47
ranted assertibility,” 193, 199–200; “What McDermott, John J., 137
Makes a Life Significant,” 117, 265, 361, McDowell, John, 20
374; Will To Believe, The, 14, 126, 130, Means–ends continuum, 17, 429, 443
135–136, 160, 163, 172, 193, 233–235, Medicine, alternative, 14–15
250, 264, 270 Meliorism, 110–114, 248, 253–255
Judaeus, Philo, 226–227 Menand, Louis: Metaphysical Club, The, 35,
Justice: conception of, 80–84, 401, 422; 123–125
theory of, 80, 83 Menkiti, Ifeanyi, 86
Metaphilosophy, 88–89. See also Philosophy
Kant, Immanuel, 3, 17, 46, 106, 160, 203, Metaphysics: metaphysical disputes, 112–114,
216, 222, 277, 288–290, 349, 433 129, 141; metaphysical question,
Kantian Reason, 74, 93, 290 335–339; metaphysical realism, 5, 15,
Kierkegaard, Søren, 20, 51–52 62–64, 141, 150, 270–271; metaphysical
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 324, 370, 382 tradition, 36
Kloppenberg, James T., 439 Meyers, Robert, 261–275
Knowledge: foundations of, 17, 90–93; moral Mill, John Stuart, 280, 376
knowledge, 94–95, 106–107, 385, 433; Miller, Dickinson S., 47, 161, 191
nonscientific knowledge, 55–70; scientific Moody-Adams, Michele, 85, 332–333
knowledge, 55–56, 68, 388, 426; theory of, Moore, G. E., 335
213, 278–279, 293–305, 312, 450 Moral philosophy: creating, 385–404; Dewey
Korsgaard, Christine, 291 on, 331–358, 360–365, 425–427,
441; James on, 52–53, 116, 162–163,
Lamberth, David, 190, 192, 195–200; 191–193, 242, 262, 331–358, 360–384;
William James and the Metaphysics of moral agents, 158, 352, 376–377, 430,
Experience, 195 445; moral inquiry, 17, 333, 342, 425–
Leibniz, Gottfried W., 230–231, 271; Theod- 426, 432–433; moral laws, 72, 291, 334,
icy, 230 386; moral realism, 6, 101, 104; moral
Lepore, Ernest, 30 relativism, 6, 119; moral skepticism, 6,
Lewis, C. I., 30 71–79, 85, 263, 333–335, 385–389,
Liberalism, 84, 88, 103–104 402–403; perceiving, 405–420; problem
Libertarianism, 84, 284 of, 334–342; question of, 334–341. See
Life: critical moments in, 366–369, 373–374, also Philosophy
382–383; democracy and, 8, 439–452; Morality: customary morality, 116, 425, 445;
meaning of, 241; moral life, 360–384, Dewey on, 116, 331–358, 360–365,
430–433; necessities of, 361–365; normal 372, 376–377, 425–427, 441; James on,
moral life, 366–369, 373, 376; percep- 52–53, 116, 162–163, 191–193, 242,
tions of, 159–160, 335–336, 413–414; 262, 331–358, 360–384; knowledge and,
significant life, 361–364, 374, 443 394–395; moral choices, 72–77, 81–83,
Locke, John, 216, 277 93–94, 113, 368–369, 390; moral
Logic: inductive logic, 56; laws of, 207–208; impulse, 261–265, 349–359; moral life,
principle of, 198–199 360–384, 430–433; moral problems, 5,
Lovejoy, Arthur, 205, 269 17, 73–79, 98, 283, 364–365, 430–433;
Macarthur, David, 9 politics and, 424; “normal moral life,”
Mach, Ernst, 209, 277 366–369, 373, 376; prudence and, 399;
Macintyre, Alasdair, 389 reflective morality, 425, 441; rules of,

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72–73, 382; science and, 72, 83–86 education, 447, 450; evasion of, 15;
Morgenbesser, Sidney, 19 James on, 14–16, 52–53, 109–110,
Morse, Frances Rollins, 201, 251 162–163, 191–193, 225–231, 261–265,
Mother Teresa, 324 331–358; metaphilosophy, 88–89;
Mounce, Howard, 3 Peirce on, 15–16, 221–224; philosoph-
Murdoch, Iris, 20, 375 ical courage, 87–107; pragmatism as,
109–110, 253–255, 349; reconstruction
Natural realism, 141, 145, 150–156, 161–164, of, 331–348. See also Moral philosophy
176. See also Realism Piatt, Donald, 20
Naturalism, 6, 36–37, 81, 86; antireductive Pillon, François, 137
naturalism, 163–164; antisupernatural- Plato, 94, 101, 106, 124, 159–160, 227,
ism, 324–325 293–294, 341; Republic, 341; Symposium,
Nazism, 7, 101, 375, 425, 449–452 227
Neo-pragmatism, 1–3, 11. See also Pragmatism Pluralism: commitment to, 98, 384, 439;
Neurath, Otto, 22, 402 empiricism and, 136–137; feminism and,
Newton, Isaac, 159, 277 115–119; James on, 116–119, 136–137,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 51 164–165, 179, 337, 437–439; pragma-
Nihilism, 37, 157 tism as, 115–120; religion and, 233–235,
Nozick, Robert, 84, 284–287; Anarchy, State 248–249, 255–260; understanding, 5
and Utopia, 284–285 Political issues, 17, 98, 103, 311, 424, 442
Nussbaum, Martha, 45, 371 Popper, Karl, 56, 57
Practice, judgments of, 293, 309–313,
Objectivity, 60–70, 172, 338–339, 361–362, 427–428
385–388 Pragmatism: classical pragmatism, 1–11,
21, 273–274; cofounder of, 124, 296;
Pacifists, 79–83 comparisons of, 36–54; contemporary
Panpsychism, 206, 213, 220, 256–260 pragmatism, 2–3; courage and, 87–107;
Pantheism, 255–257, 260. See also God description of, 1–2; Dewey on, 2–4, 8,
Papini, Giovanni, 167, 209 13–14, 89, 124–127, 130–131; differences
Peirce, Charles S.: fallibilism and, 25, 64; in, 36–54; founder of, 67, 124, 140, 350;
“Fixation of Belief, The,” 16, 49, 67, future of, 108–120; history of, 123–126;
123–124; as founder of pragmatism, hope and, 87–107; idealism and, 2–3,
67, 124, 140, 350; friendships of, 203, 216–217; James on, 2–4, 8, 14–15,
221–224; “How to Make Our Ideas 21–23, 35, 89, 108–114, 123–140,
Clear,” 124, 223; “Neglected Argument 225–260; as meliorism, 110–114, 248,
for the Reality of God, A,” 129–130; 253–255; neo-pragmatism, 1–3, 11; non-
on philosophy, 15–16, 221–224; on scientific knowledge and, 55–70; Peirce
pragmatism, 2–3, 13–16, 21–26, 35, on, 2–3, 13–16, 21–26, 35, 67, 124–134,
67, 124–134, 221–224, 350–351; on 221–224, 350–351; as philosophy,
realism, 142, 152; on truth, 168–173, 109–110, 253–255, 349; as pluralism,
193, 198–200, 341–346; on “warranted 115–120; principle of, 127–130; as public
assertibility,” 296–297 philosophy, 109–110; radical empiricism
Penn, William, 400 and, 108, 123, 136–139; realism and,
Perception, conception of, 186, 302–306, 140–158; Rorty on, 2–3, 13–14, 87–92;
408–420; theory of, 141, 147–148, 151, seamless webs and, 71–86; seriousness
274–275 of, 13–20; theory of truth and, 130–136;
Perry, Ralph, 172, 186, 190, 209, 213, 236; verificationism and, 21–35; views on, 1–9,
Thought and Character of William James, 236 18–20; vindication of, 29, 35
Phenomenology, 51, 143–145 Prediction, 23, 69–70, 119, 177–179, 273,
Philosophy: Dewey on, 14–15, 65–67, 281, 444
109–116, 302–313, 331–358; of Psychology: contents, 39; explanations, 45;

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phenomena, 40–45 panpsychism and, 256–260; pantheism

Putnam, Hilary; Cambridge Companion to Wil- and, 255–257, 260; pluralism and,
liam James, The, 261; Collapse of the Fact/ 233–235, 248–249, 255–260; psychol-
Value Dichotomy and Other Essays, 20; ogist of, 237–238, 251; religious experi-
“Education for Democracy,” 447; Ethics ence, 232–247; science and, 77–78, 248,
without Ontology, 1; Philosophical Papers, 294–295, 323–324; souls and, 230–232,
87; Pragmatism: An Open Question, 1; 238, 256–259; subconscious self and,
“Pragmatism and Realism,” 140–141, 244–245, 253
274; Realism with a Human Face, 1; Robertson, Croom, 218
Renewing Philosophy, 1; Representation and Rockefeller, Steven, 317
Reality, 44; Threefold Cord, The, 44; “Wil- Roosevelt, Franklin, 200, 452
liam James’s Ideas,” 270; Words and Life, 1 Rorty, Richard: Achieving Our Country, 87, 95;
Putnam, Ruth Anna; Cambridge Companion antirealism and, 59; on causal connec-
to William James, The, 261; “Education tion, 148–150; on courage, 87–107; on
for Democracy,” 447; “William James’s culture, 58–59; on democracy, 421–422;
Ideas,” 270; Words and Life, 1 “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 87; friend-
ships of, 210; on hope, 87–107; “Human
Quine, W. V. O., 20, 27–31, 37–39, 51, 56, Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality,”
69, 115, 148, 162, 207, 339; “Two Dog- 94; “Moral Progress: Toward More Inclu-
mas of Empiricism,” 115 sive Communities,” 87; on philosophical
courage, 87–107; Philosophy and the
Racism, 72, 86, 98–99, 114, 406, 451 Mirror of Nature, 87–89, 93; “Postmod-
Radical empiricism: James on, 44, 128, ern Bourgeois Liberalism,” 103; on prag-
136–143, 152–176, 201–202, 216, 235, matism, 2–3, 13–14, 87–92; “Rationality
248, 253, 297, 355–359; metaphysics of, and Cultural Difference,” 97; on social
153, 158, 165–172, 175; ontology of, hope, 87–107; Truth and Progress, 87–88;
208; pragmatism and, 108, 123, 136–139 vision of, 87–107
Rationalism, 49–50, 229–231, 254, 276–279 Rosch, Eleanor, 33–34
Rawls, John, 80, 83–84, 103–104, 291, 364, Royce, Josiah, 30, 185, 231, 254–255
380, 401–404, 422, 436; Theory of Justice, Rudner, Richard, 19
A, 80, 83 Russell, Bertrand, 27, 50, 141, 151–157, 207,
Realism: antirealism, 4–5, 59, 140–142, 150, 269, 297, 305–306, 409, 452; Analysis of
156–157, 308–309; direct realism, 5, Mind, The, 50, 151, 154–156, 274; Our
140–141, 147–156, 265, 271–275; James Knowledge of the External World, 305, 409
on, 140–166; metaphysical realism, 5,
15, 62–64, 141, 150, 270–271; moral Sartre, Jean-Paul, 390, 395
realism, 6, 101, 104; natural realism, 141, Scheffler, Israel, 207
145, 150–156, 161–164, 176; Peirce on, Schiller, F. C. S., 124, 130, 202, 210–212
142, 152; pragmatism and, 140–158 Schilpp, Paul, A.: Philosophy of John Dewey,
Reasonableness, judgments of, 60–61, 68 The, 302
Reductionism, 37–38, 46, 164, 378 Science: knowledge, 55–56, 68, 388, 426;
Reichenbach, Hans, 20, 22, 114 method, 5, 16, 56, 322, 325, 345;
Reid, Thomas, 140, 151 scientism, 4, 229–231
Religion: absolute idealism and, 248, Seabright, Paul, 371
254–263; beliefs and, 16, 23, 135, 163, Seamless webs, 71–86
189–190, 232–260, 264, 322–327; Sellars, Wilfrid, 148–150
Dewey on, 314–327; faith and, 233–243, Singer, E. A., Jr., 19
248–260, 314–327; hypotheses on, Skepticism: antifoundationalism and, 270–
233–235, 241–242, 250–251, 260; James 271; Cartesian doubt, 15–17; fallibilism
on, 232–260, 316, 324; over-beliefs, and, 132, 136; James on, 358–360; moral
232–247, 253, 255–260, 264–265, 316; skepticism, 6, 71–79, 85, 263, 333–335,

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I NDE X 475
385–389, 402–403; prediction and, Values: creating, 385–404; democracy and,

69–70; scientism and, 4, 229–230 421–438; explanation of, 71; formation
Society: environment, 109, 115–116, 396; of, 118–119; judgments of, 18–20,
hope, 87–107; problems, 5, 17, 84, 105, 60–70, 280, 293, 300–313, 415–423,
311, 433–437, 442–448; public space, 426–433; moral values, basis of, 6; moral
161–162, 273–274; status, 115–116 values, creating, 72–74, 385–404; moral
Sociobiology, 288–289 values, democracy and, 329, 331–452;
Socrates, 7, 104, 227 moral values, need for, 72–86, 93; moral
Solipsisms, 17, 22, 137, 153–154, 161, 205, values, perceiving, 405–420; objective
355–359 moral values, 172, 349, 361–362,
Sprigge, Timothy L., 190, 192; James and 385–389; perceiving, 405–420; theory
Bradley, 192 of, 280, 312; understanding, 421–438;
Strawson, Peter, 26–28, 147 value inquiry, 421–438; valuings and, 6,
Striker, Gisela, 146 65–67, 71, 358, 376–377, 408, 417–420,
Subconscious self, 244–245, 253 424
Subjectivity, 61–63, 134–136, 144, 338–339, Verificationism, 21–35, 174–186
386–392
Supernaturalism, 241, 314, 324–325. See also Walsh, Vivian, 40
Naturalism War, 79–80, 83, 314, 359
Swift, Morrison L., 110 Warranted assertibility, 62–63, 66, 193,
199–200, 296–297, 347–348
Taylor, Charles, 237–238 Weber, Max, 76–78, 86; “Science as a Voca-
Temperaments, 228–230, 270 tion,” 76
Temptations, 77, 288, 347, 366–367, Weil, Simone, 58
381–383 Wellmer, Albrecht, 343–346
Thinking, stages of, 124–125, 134 West, Cornel, 15, 88, 110, 409; American
Traditional empiricism, 8, 49, 158, 165, 206, Evasion of Philosophy, The, 15
216, 276 Westbrook, Robert B., 218, 292, 439–440,
Truth: absolute truth, 8, 131–133, 173, 444, 448–450
183–184, 193–200, 345; conceptual White, Morton, 85
truth, 29–34, 102, 171; correspondence Whitehead, Alfred North, 56–57
theory, 90–91; determining, 169–170; Whitman, Walt, 105, 166
Dewey on, 124, 136, 296–297; empirical Williams, Bernard, 37–40, 81, 360, 368–370;
truth, 29–30; James on, 128, 134–137, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 40
167–200, 265–266, 341–347; meaning Williamson, Timothy, 207
of, 128, 134–137, 172–173, 182–190, Winkler, Ken, 74
234–236, 345–346; objective truth, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 33–35, 114, 145–146,
188–189, 194, 337; Peirce on, 168–173, 175, 207, 336–337, 347
193, 198–200, 341–346; theory of, 3, Wolff, Robert Paul, 285, 287
14–16, 21, 90, 112, 123–124, 130–136, World, spatiotemporal world, 272, 305–306;
141–142, 167–196, 228, 266–267, 333, temporal world, 161, 231, 272, 295
341–347 Wright, Chauncey, 35
Utilitarianism, 279–288, 376–377, 432–433 Zeno’s paradox, 207–208

Utopias, 95, 99–104, 382, 405–406, 417 Ziff, Paul, 20
Validation, 175
Valuation, 185–186, 321, 408–409, 421–424

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(Hilary Putnam Ruth Anna Putnam) Pragmatism As A PDF

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Pragmatism as a Way of Life

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Hil ary Putnam

THE BELK NA P PR ESS OF H A RVA R D U NI V ER SIT Y PR ESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England / 2017

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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Standard Editions of the Works of the Classical Pragmatists ix

Introduction by David Macarthur 1

The Insights of Classical and Neo-Pragmatism

1. Taking Pragmatism Seriously 13

2. Pragmatism and Verificationism 21

3. What Makes Pragmatism So Different? 36

4. Pragmatism and Nonscientific Knowledge 55

5. Weaving Seamless Webs 71

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6. Rorty’s Vision: Philosophical Courage and Social Hope 87

7. Reflections on the Future of Pragmatism 108

Key Topics in the Pragmatism of James and Dewey

8. Was James a Pragmatist? 123

9. Pragmatism and Realism 140

11. James’s Theory of Truth 167

12. James on Truth (Again) 188

13. James’s Philosophical Friendships, 1902–1905 201

14. What James’s Pragmatism Offers Us: A Reading of the

15. Varieties of Experience and Pluralities of Perspective 232

16. William James on Religion 248

17. The Real William James: Response to Robert Meyers 261

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18. Dewey’s Central Insight 276

19. Dewey’s Epistemology 293

20. Dewey’s Faith 314

Pragmatist Conceptions of Moral Value and Democracy

21. Philosophy as a Reconstructive Activity: William James on

22. The Moral Impulse 349

23. The Moral Life of a Pragmatist 360

24. Creating Facts and Values 385

25. Perceiving Facts and Values 405

26. Democracy and Value Inquiry 421

27. Democracy as a Way of Life 439

Appendix: Other Works on Pragmatism by Hilary Putnam and

Works Cited 457

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The individual volumes, with original date of publication:

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The individual volumes, with original date of publication:

The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898, 5 vols. Carbondale: Southern

The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, 15 vols. Carbondale: Southern

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Brought to you by | Utrecht University Library

Brought to you by | Utrecht University Library

The present volume is a collection of a large majority of the writings of

1. For a detailed list of the omitted papers see the Appendix.

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1. Ruth Anna Putnam is an internationally renowned interpreter of

2. Chapter 1 of this volume.

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particularly the critical philosophies of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel.4

4. Recent works on Peirce include Cheryl Misak (ed.) Cambridge Companion to

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7. Dewey, Later Works, 1:298.

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2. Pragmatism and Verificationism 21

14. What James’s Pragmatism Offers Us: A Reading of the

15. Varieties of Experience and Pluralities of Perspective 232

Appendix: Other Works on Pragmatism by Hilary Putnam and

The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898, 5 vols. Carbondale: Southern

The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, 15 vols. Carbondale: Southern