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Eight Pragmatism and the Reconstruction of Metaphysics: Toward aNew Understanding of Foundations SANDRA °B. ROSENTHA L Though the understanding of a particular philosophic method is perhaps tile key to understanding any philosophic position, this is more than usually crucial to understanding the position of classical American pragmatism-i-that movement incorporating the thought of William James, John Dewey, Charles Peirce, C. I. Lewis, and G. H. Mead.' Various forms of inadequate appreciation for the systematic significance? of the pragmatic understanding of the creative dimension within scientific method and of its relation to human biologic activity had far-reaching results. Pragmatism was viewed as, on the one hand, foundationalist in its epistemological and/or metaphysical claims, and, on the other hand, antifoundationalist, historicist, and, at the extreme, heralding the end of metaphysics. This latter view has of course been appropriated in the recent deconstructionist focus on pragmatic philosophy. However, a focus on the complexities of the pragmatic understanding of scientific experimentalism and biological activity will reveal them as the essential pragmatic tools for fashioning a new pathway toward metaphysics with a resultant new understanding of the nature of the metaphysical enterprise, Such a pathway, fashioned by the paradigmatic novelty of pragmatism, is neither foundation- 166 SANDRA B. ROSENTHAL alist nor antifoundationalist but, rather, undercuts the frameworks within which such alternatives make sense? The ensuing discussion first turns briefly to the pragmatic understanding of scientific method as the structure of inquiry as such, exemplified by any and all experimental activity. Such an understanding avoids reductionistic tendencies to confuse or conflate scientific method and scientific content; avoids formalistic attempts to confine scientific thinking within fixed rules and decision procedures, thus robbing scientific method of its speculative directions; and sets the stage for an understanding of knowledge in general that eludes the alternatives of foundationalism or antifoundationalism as well as other family related sets of traditional alternatives. The beginning phase of scientific method, not as a formalized deductive model, not as a metaphysical enterprise illicitly reifying scientific contents as supposed ultimate truths, not as a causal analysis of humans and their environment.' but as lived experimental activity, exemplifies human creativity. Scientific creativity arises out of the matrix of ordinary experience and in turn refers back to this everyday experience. Though the contents of an abstract scientific theory may be far removed from the qualitative aspects of everyday experience, such contents are not the found structures of some "ultimate reality of nature." Rather, they are abstractive transformations of lived experience, and the possibility of their coming to be as objects of scientific knowledge requires and is founded upon the qualitative experience of the scientist. As Mead observes, "the ultimate touchstone of reality is a piece of experience found in an unanalyzed world .... We can never retreat behind immediate experience to analyzed elements that constitute the ultimate reality of all immediate experience, for whatever breath of reality these elements possess has been breathed into them by some unanalyzed experience." 5 In Dewey's terms, the refined products of scientific inquiry "inherit their full content of meaning within the context of actual experience." 6 However, the return to the context of everyday or "lived" experience is never a brute return, for, as Dewey continues, "we cannot achieve recovery of primitive naivete. But there is attainable a cultivated naivete of eye, ear, and thought, one that can be acquired only through the discipline of severe thought." 7 Such a return to everyday primary experience is approached through Pragmatismand theReconstructionofMetaphysics the systematic categories of scientific thought by which the richness of experience is fused with new meaning. Thus the technical knowing of second-level reflective experience and the "having" of perceptual experience each gain inlmeaning through the other. Further, such creativity implies" for the pragmatist, a rejection of the "passive-spectator" view of knowledge and an introduction of the active, creative agent, who, through meanings, helps structure the objects of knowledge, and who thus cannot be separated from the worlcl in which such objects emerge. Thus James notes of scientific method that there is a big difference between verification as the cause of the preservation of scientific conceptions, and creativity as the cause of their production." As Dewey emphasizes this noetic creativity in science, "What is known is seen to be a product in which the act of observation plays a necessary role. Knowing is seen to be a participant in what is finally known." Both perception and the meaningful backdrop within which it occurs are shot through with...

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