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Reviewed by:
  • Naturalism and Pragmatism by Jay Schulkin
  • Brian Jenkin
Naturalism and Pragmatism. Jay Schulkin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. xv + 336 pp. $90 cloth.

With the publication of Jay Schulkin’s Naturalism and Pragmatism, pragmatist philosophers and theologians have been done a great service. A neuroscientist by training, Schulkin brings robust scientific data to bear on pragmatism’s naturalistic theory of inquiry, often charged as superficially concerned with practical expediency—that is, with “what works” apart from considerations of meaning and value that befit what Ernest Sosa influentially called “serious philosophy.”1 To serious-minded pragmatists, it is frustrating that facile readings of pragmatism—namely, that it is simply a disguised form of antirealism and/or relativism—remain a century after Dewey dutifully clarified what practicality means for pragmatism.2

After situating pragmatism amidst related post-Enlightenment sensibilities (e.g., Romanticism, naturalism, critical realism, etc.) and swiftly reviewing its core tenets (e.g., radical empiricism, continuity between nature and humankind, social progressivism, etc.), Schulkin spends some time introducing the work of pragmatism’s irascible founder, Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce’s thought is perhaps the densest and least understood of the classical American pragmatists—Schulkin with affection and accuracy calls Peirce “a fistful [End Page 82] of contradictions” (29). Considering this, Schulkin deserves major credit for demonstrating how Peirce’s “laboratory frame of mind” (30) laid the foundation not only for the penetrating insights of William James and John Dewey after him but for significant breakthroughs in several areas of knowledge.

Peirce’s contributions to formal logic, semiotics, and experimental design are well known, yet Schulkin gives them a fresh perspective and appreciation: that of a practicing scientist. Peirce’s developments in these areas cut against the accepted Aristotelian grain and provided science with a sense of its own history that has, as Schulkin fairly convincingly claims, facilitated its rapid growth ever since. According to Schulkin, Peirce even set the stage for contemporary developments in the field of embodied-enactive cognitive science, which usually cites Dewey, if any pragmatist, as an influence. Though he “biologizes” (if I may be forgiven a neologism) Peirce more than this reader feels is warranted, Schulkin does a masterful job of showcasing, despite obvious differences in style and method, the continuity of concern among the classical American pragmatists.

The priority given to Peirce in Schulkin’s analysis is warranted and a welcome corrective to presentations of pragmatism where Peirce appears as little more than a shadowy background figure. It was, after all, Peirce’s conviction that inquiry is fundamentally experimental that marked off pragmatism as a distinct philosophical position—even if better known to the wider public through the work of James and Dewey or “neopragmatists” Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty. And, as Schulkin insightfully points out, it was Peirce who made the fallibility of reason respectable by enshrining it in the logical notion of “abduction,” now a cornerstone of modern scientific methodology. Abduction, or “guessing,” was Peirce’s term for hypothesis formation and testing, a nod to the fact that human knowing isn’t as tidy and rule-based as the processes of deduction and induction would have one believe. Skillfully connecting anthropological and archeological evidence with contemporary neuroscientific findings, Schulkin makes clear that our predilection for guesswork in no way represents a cognitive shortcoming. On the contrary, it is an evolved consequence of the vagueness and generality that have pervaded human experience since its very beginnings. It is, in Schulkin’s illustrative terminology, a “cephalic capability” (48) rooted in our biological inheritance—a theme less prevalent in Peirce but one James would pick up on and Dewey would run with.

Like Dewey, Schulkin makes artful use of complex evolutionary theory to communicate a simple—though still resisted by many—truth about human nature. Basically, gradual changes via natural selection, along with chance variations in adaptation, are directly responsible for who we are, the meaning of the problems we face, and the values by which we solve them today. With a [End Page 83] directness uncommon in works that seek to apply scientific principles to philosophical debates, Schulkin argues that it was only by a cognitive anchoring to certain kinds of objects (e.g...

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