The Pragmatic Turn by Richard J. Bernstein (review)

Over many decades, Richard Bernstein has interpreted contemporary philosophy’s three traditions, roughly distinguished as analytic, pragmatic, and Continental, emphasizing their mutual affinities. Despite this reference to the continent of Europe, it would be wrong to identify any of these traditions geographically or linguistically; even to call them ‘traditions’ is stretching a point. Pragmatism originated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it has spread from there, transmogrifying in the process and claiming surprising allies, such as Heidegger; the label ‘pragmatist’ has even been affixed to Hegel! That its day has come is the theme of this, Bernstein’s latest book. Its title is a play on Richard Rorty’s famous anthology of 1967, The Linguistic Turn. It, however, is not an anthology, though several of its chapters were previously published, but an argument. The argument, roughly, is that philosophers from Hegel onward have been grappling with the same set of problems and that Peirce lighted the way to what is becoming recognized as their most adequate solution.

The book’s nine chapters are preceded by a chapter-length Prologue in which is laid the ground for Bernstein’s claim that pragmatism has now achieved a ‘global reach’: it is to locate Peirce’s pragmatism, usually associated with his papers of 1877–8, within the context of his 1868–9 attack on Cartesianism. Rejection of Cartesianism, or, more generally, epistemological foundationalism, has been a growing theme of post-Kantian philosophy. If knowledge is without foundations, how then is it possible? One answer is that it grows in the soil of practice. The idea—I assume, for Bernstein does not say—is that practical inquiry did not begin deliberately, that it revises its implicit norms as it goes along, in consequence of its consequences, and thus that there is epistemic progress without foundations. Many anti-foundationalist philosophies attribute a primacy to practice, making them in a broad sense pragmatic. Bernstein does not comment on the ambiguity of this primacy: must what is grounded in practice also be practical in purpose?

When, in 1868–9, Peirce rejected Descartes’ assumption that knowledge must be founded on intuition—cognition determined immediately by its object—he asserted that every cognition is preceded by another from which it is inferred. In Chapter 1, Bernstein glosses this as contrasting cause and reason, enabling him to relate Peirce’s view to those of several later philosophers in the analytic tradition: by making all cognition inferential, Peirce placed judgment exclusively within what Wilfrid Sellars, inspired by Wittgenstein, distinguished as the logical space of reasons; like Donald Davidson, Peirce held that nothing but another belief can be a reason for a belief; which leads to the problem that John McDowell discussed, of how, consistently with that view, thought can be constrained by anything but thought, or how thought can be said to be about anything other than itself. McDowell’s solution is similar to what Peirce said in his later years (in passages of 1902 and 1903 that Bernstein quotes): while every judgment is conceptual and none is independent of the assumptions built into concepts, some judgments do occur non-inferentially—Peirce called them ‘perceptual’. Bernstein does not remark that this is a change of doctrine, a flat-out contradiction of what was said in 1868–9. Infinite regress of judgment is not the only alternative to intuitionism. But how can a judgment, which is conceptual, be occasioned by a physical stimulus, which is non-conceptual? What makes perceptual judgments to be about that which exists independently of them? And how is this related to Peirce’s ‘pragmatic’ maxim for clarifying meanings? These questions, surprisingly, are not raised, much less addressed.

Chapters 2 and 3, on William James’ ethics and John Dewey’s politics, respectively, suggest by light brush-strokes how the picture of classical pragmatism’s contemporary relevance might be filled in (assuming that the primacy of practice pertains to ends). Chapter 4 takes us back to Hegel and forward, again, to Sellars and McDowell but also to Brandom. It continues the theme of...