What Pragmatism Was by F. Thomas Burke (review)

Pragmatism, like every other important intellectual tradition, is best characterized as a tradition of debate. In every intellectual tradition for which internal debate is central, the substance of the constitutive contestations sometimes concerns the aims and achievements of the tradition itself. In the case of pragmatism, the long history of these contesting interpretations is well known. Recent pragmatist philosophy has been characterized by debates between analytic neo-pragmatisms and so-called ‘American’ classico-pragmatisms. Long before these contemporary debates, Arthur Lovejoy wrote provocatively of thirteen pragmatisms. Before Lovejoy there was much jousting between Charles Sanders Peirce and William James over what pragmatism would and could be.

One metaphor we might poach from pragmatism itself to describe its own internal conflicts would suggest that every important intellectual tradition is at its core vague. All such traditions are sufficiently complex to admit of competing developments and refinements. We might say that Peirce’s original formulation of pragmatism, despite its goal of achieving a higher grade of clarity, was itself vague. James took it in one direction. Peirce pulled it in another. Such ineradicable vagueness in philosophical ideas was something both Peirce and James seem to have affirmed.

While in some periods (for instance Lovejoy’s) scholars are wont to emphasize the diversity and vagueness of philosophical traditions, in other periods (perhaps ours) the appeal of unified narratives of progressive refinement seems more attractive. But the latter sorts of periods are never able to fully escape from the internal diversity constitutive of any vigorous intellectual tradition. For every attempt to locate unity inevitably finds itself at odds with other such accounts of unity.

F. Thomas Burke’s What Pragmatism Was is an excellent example of the recent ‘unifying’ tendency in scholarship. From this book one gains, first, valuable instruction in a strategy for overcoming the intellectual impasses that seemed to have separated Peirce and James and which presumably still separate contemporary Peirceans and Jamesians (chs. 1–4). From here, the unified account is leveraged to distinguish pragmatism from more certain prominent analytic empiricisms with which pragmatism is, we are told, too often confused (chs. 5–8). In its third and last movement, the book aims to develop specific applications and examples of the unified pragmatism earlier developed (chs. 8–10, with ch. 8 functioning as something of a bridge).

Burke’s book bears comparison with other recent unifying narratives. One obvious comparison is to Cheryl Misak’s The American Pragmatists (Oxford UP, 2013). Misak offers almost the directly opposite thesis to that pursued in the second part of Burke’s book: whereas Burke defends pragmatism against the allure of analytic empiricism (Quine and Carnap, specifically), Misak expressly develops a reading of pragmatism as anticipating analytic tendencies (as expressed by C. I. Lewis, Quine, and in forthcoming work, Frank Ramsey). Another instructive contrast is to Richard Bernstein’s The Pragmatic Turn (Polity, 2010), which excellently illuminates the connections between classical pragmatisms and more contemporary offerings expressive of Hegelian tendencies, such as those found in the analytic Hegalianisms of Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell, and that expressed in Jürgen Habermas’s critical theoretical Hegelianism.

This is not the place to adjudicate among competing readings of pragmatism. I only wish to emphasize a certain tension that will be at play in any attempt to unify a philosophical tradition, pragmatism included. One can, I should think, learn much from all such attempts even if one is hesitant to proffer any such offering as the one way to go about unifying.

What is most distinctive and appealing about Burke’s offering is the focus he brings to a theme that, I would argue, is of decisive importance for pragmatism both historically and presently, but which too often gets lost in debates that would distract us from it. This is the theme of action. I describe this theme under the rubric of “conduct pragmatism” (see my article of that title forthcoming in the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 2, 2014). Burke’s...