America's Philosophical Vision (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 645 allow primitive proper names in his arithmetical science. Even if she is correct in this attribution, the antimetaphysical interpretation does not follow. One could just as well claim that Frege's delineation of his formal representation of arithmetical truths does not of itself justify his metaphysics, not that he had no metaphysics to justify. In addition, her claim that his philosophical writings consist of elucidations rather than of assertions seems to be a rather desperate attempt to avoid taking his views at their face value. I am not convinced that Frege's writings constitute a ladder that we can throw away once we have understood his formal system. CHARLES LANDESMAN Hunter College, CUNY John E. Smith. America's Philosophical Vision. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Pp. vii + 213. Cloth, $39.95- Paper, $15.95. This collection of essays by John E. Smith brings together ten studies originally published between 1965 and 1987. They represent Smith at his best: a powerful and confident interpreter and critic and a wonderfully clear writer who often surprises us with his dry wit. The essays focus on Peirce,James, Royce, and Dewey and, in the final one, Smith identifies what he takes to be the hallmarks of philosophy in America? But his approach is critical rather than merely historical. In "The Reflexive Turn, the Linguistic Turn, and the Pragmatic Outcome," for instance (written in 1969), after identifying the key assumptions of recent metalinguistic and metaphilosophical inquiry--typified by A. J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap--and recalling their sources in Locke and Kant, he shows how Peirce and Dewey anticipated Quine's well-known and well-regarded pragmatic critique of the attempt to attain, at the critical and metalinguistic level, the kind of intuitive certainty and neutrality we have failed to attain concerning first-order philosophic issues.* Agreeing that "the quest for certainty at the meta level must be given up" along with "the attempt to eliminate disagreement in advance," Smith himself argues that, in the search for criteria of meaning and knowing, we must "estimate analytical results in terms of the purposes of inquiry and in terms of the adequacy with which a given set of linguistic forms or a given set of concepts and rules actually elucidate and explain the subject matter into which we inquire" (1o 1). ' Smith indudes George Santayana and George Herbert Mead in this group, and indicates that he finds their work significant. It is to be hoped that he will write papers on these philosophers that are as illuminating as those he has written on Peirce, James, Royce, and Dewey. 9W. V. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953). Smith also identifies a pragmatic thesis regarding the acceptance or rejection of linguistic forms in Carnap's t95~ paper "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology," (see Smith, 39-4o), which he cites along with Quine's essay to illustrate "the appearance of the pragnmtir turn within the internal development of linguistic philosophy itself" (99, italics original). To illustrate the two theses of linguistic analysis themselves, Smith has quoted a passage from Carnap's Philosophyand LogicalSyntax, which was published in 1955and, at the very least, seems to be a turning back from the instrumentalism of the ~95o statements. 646 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3 1 '4 OCTOBER 1993 While he calls attention to their strengths, Smith is not uncritical of the Americans. In "The Critique of Abstractions and the Scope of Reason," for example, he concludes that Dewey's "radical pluralism" is no less problematic than Hegers "overweening emphasis upon the whole" (115)" He also raises important criticisms of Royce, particularly regarding the tension in Royce's system between the Absolute and the individual self. At the same time, he challenges William James's simplistic jettisoning of Royce's Absolute, calling attention to Royce's own struggle with this problem and his attempt to solve it by means of the principle of voluntarism and the analysis of interpretation-reflexive as well as interpersonalMas creative. The metaphysical issue aside, one is struck by the relevance of Royce's analysis of interpretation as mediation and as the creation of community...