The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism

5. The Decline and Resurgence of American Pragmatism: W.V. Quine and Richard Rorty

5 The Decline and Resurgence of American Pragmatism: W. V. Quine and Richard Rorty I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historic cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action. -John Dewey Although American pragmatism is widely regarded as the distinctive American philosophy, it has never been hegemonic in the academic profession of philosophy. Even during the heyday of James and Dewey, old forms of idealism and new versions of naturalism and realism dominated the major philosophy departments in the country. Moreover, the major followers of James and Dewey tended not to be influential professional philosophers, but rather engaged public philosophers. There indeed were exceptions, most notably Ralph Barton Perry (a realist pupil of James) and C. 1. Lewis (a self-styled conceptual pragmatist), both at Harvard. Yet in large measure American pragmatism did not gain a large following in the higher echelons of the academy. This was so for three basic reasons. First, the antiprofessional implications of pragmatism discouraged its wholesale incorporation into the academy. Second, the revolution in and fascination with symbolic logic 182 W. V. Quine and Richard Rorty 183 initiated by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (1913) - and reinforced by the breakthroughs of Leopold Lowenheim, Thoralf Skolem, Alonzo Church, and Kurt Godel- turned professional philosophical attention to problems about which pragmatism had little to say. Third, and most important, Austrian and German emigres, in flight from the Nazis, brought to the American philosophical scene a project of rigor, purity, precision, and seriousness-logical positivism . The impact of Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Alfred Tarski, Herbert Feigl, and Carl Hempel was immense. In fact, logical positivism seized the imagination of the most talented young philosophers in the country. Pragmatism appeared to them to be vague and muddleheaded. The major effect of logical positivism was to turn attention away from historical consciousness and social reflection and toward logic and physics. Its chief aim was the analysis and clarification of meaning; its goal, to unify the sciences by providing an account of their operation while acknowledging the crucial role of logic and mathematics. Logical positivism was an extension of a nineteenth-century Viennese empirical tradition best seen in the antimetaphysical writings of Ernst Mach. The famous "Vienna Circle," led principally by Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Friedrich Waismann, Kurt Godel, and Rudolf Carnap, was dominated by philosophers preoccupied with new developments in theoretical physics and symbolic logic. Notwithstanding its diversity and variety, logical positivism rested upon three basic assumptions. First, it assumed a form of sentential atomism which correlates isolated sentences with either possible empirical confirmation (those of science), logical necessity (those of logic and mathematics), or emotion (those of ethics, art, and religion). Second, it emerged with a kind of phenomenalist reductionism which translates sentences about physical objects into sentences about actual and possible sensations. Third, it presupposed a verification theory of meaning which holds observational evidence to be the criterion for cognitively meaningful sentences and hence the final court of appeal in determining valid theories of the way the world is. These independent yet interrelated doctrines held at various times by leading logical positivists were guided by fundamental distinctions between the analytic and the synthetic, the linguistic and the empirical, theory and observation.l Logical positivism was buttressed by the formidable realist revolts enacted by Gottlob Frege, Alexius Meinong, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore.2 Frege revolted against John Stuart Mill's psychologism and John Venn's conventionalism in logic; Meinong, against Franz Brentano's psychologism in object theory; Russell and Moore against F. H. Bradley's Hegelian idealism in metaphysics and epistemology. To these realists of different stripes, pragmatism appeared to be but an American footnote to psychologism, conventionalism, and idealism. 184 The Decline and Resurgence of American Pragmatism In addition to these assaults and putdowns, pragmatism did not benefit from the other major developments in North Atlantic philosophy. Edmund Husserl's search for an alternative to naturalism and historicism (or skepticism and relativism) led to a conception of philosophy as rigorous science in which "essences" were grasped by presuppositionless phenomenological investigation.3 Martin Heidegger, a student of Husserl, inaugurated an ontological inquiry into the conditions for the possibility of metaphysics, an inquiry that ignored pragmatism since...