Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty by Colin Koopman (review)

In Pragmatism as Transition, Colin Koopman argues for a vision of pragmatism that is at once old and new, seeking to overcome the divide between classicopragmatism and neo-pragmatism through a vision of pragmatism whose central feature is “transitionalism.” Transitionalism, for Koopman, is a thoroughly historicist outlook that is present in all forms of pragmatism, even if not as well thematized as it might have been. On his reading, then, “pragmatism’s most important philosophical contribution is that of redescribing the philosophical practices of thought, critique, and inquiry such that these practices take place in time and through history.”¹ Adopting such an historicist outlook on the development of pragmatism enables Koopman to navigate the fraught relationship between the pragmatisms of James, Dewey and Rorty, drawing on what is best in each while rejecting the old shibboleths of their respective defenders—“experience” and “language,” respectively.

Transitionalism, for Koopman, is characterized not only by attention to the historicity of our philosophical practices, but just as importantly, by a commitment to meliorist cultural critique. Thus, the temporality of Koopman’s vision of pragmatism is purposively multidirectional: the truly engaged cultural critic is not a utopian, but “stand[s] against some specific historical reality in the name of some specifiably better, and actually possible, historical reality.”² The philosophical outlook Koopman advocates is thus, in many ways, standard for pragmatists (though it does, importantly, explicitly exclude the work of Peirce from the realm of exemplary pragmatism, as Peirce was “simply not invested in the project of cultural critique,”³ even if some of his followers have attempted to formulate moral and political theories on the basis of Peircean epistemology). And yet, the particulars of Koopman’s cashing-out of “pragmatism as transition” make for a reconstruction of pragmatism that many pragmatists, particularly Deweyans, will find surprising and challenging.

Koopman begins pointing to transitionalist themes in the history of pragmatism in chapter 2, but the core of the argument—and the most impressive argument of the book—is in chapter 3, where Koopman argues for what he calls a “third wave of pragmatism”⁴ that follows on the first wave of classicopragmatism (exemplified by James and Dewey’s emphasis on experience) and the second wave of neo-pragmatism (exemplified by Rorty’s emphasis on language) in such a way that it “cumulatively washes in upon the other two waves rather than disaccumulatively draining them away.”⁵ This wave metaphor is important, for readers should not make the mistake of thinking that Koopman comes only to initiate hand-holding and reconciliation: his transitionalist pragmatism, while emerging from waters clearly shared by James, Dewey and Rorty, comes crashing in upon all three in this chapter, and Koopman argues forcefully that we contemporary pragmatists ought to be swept along, too.

The crux of Koopman’s argument for transitionalism is epistemological: despite their varying emphases, the classicopragmatists and the neo-pragmatists are ultimately united by the inadequacy of their attempts to circumvent the problems of modern, foundationalist, representationalist epistemology, which Sellars famously described as “givenism.”⁶ Though classical pragmatists were eager to distance themselves from the modernist epistemological project, Koopman argues that appeals to the immediacy of experience show up repeatedly in the work of Dewey and James (and in their readers) in ways that appear to be “dangerously near to foundationalism.”⁷ The issue, for Koopman, is not merely that Dewey (for example) posited the existence of a raw, immediate, given experience, but that he “expended enormous energy precisely specifying the havings of primary experience in his epistemology and ethics,”⁸ which suggests that they are carrying significant epistemic weight, and indeed, that they function as covert foundations. Rorty and Brandom, of course, attempt to avoid the pitfalls of foundationalism by fully embracing the linguistic turn. This strategy, while wildly divergent from classicopragmatism and partially on target (insofar as it takes seriously the mediation of experience), serves pragmatism no better...