Practice, Judgement, and the Challenge of Moral and Political Disagreement: A Pragmatist Account by Roberto Frega (review)

Roberto Frega’s Practice, Judgement, and the Challenge of Moral and Political Disagreement is exegetically, as well as systematically, ambitious: it explores several key texts of Charles Peirce and John Dewey in order to develop a pragmatist conception of practical rationality in the context of contemporary moral and political philosophy. Frega’s book differs from other recent comparable contributions, such as those of Cheryl Misak, Eric MacGilvray, and Robert Talisse, by drawing most heavily on Dewey’s works. Yet, similar to Misak, MacGilvray and Talisse, Frega puts pragmatism to the test by applying it to deep moral disagreements in modern societies and does so without relying on facts about American cultural and political history in particular. What is thus proposed is a pragmatist conception of practical rationality that is relevant well beyond the American context and beyond the 19^th and 20^th century.

The book has three parts, and the first turns to Peirce’s and Dewey’s theories of inquiry. Frega explores how Peirce’s classical text “The Fixation of Belief” may serve as the starting point for what he calls “a practice-based conception of rationality”, and for the naturalistic account on which such conception rests, viewing rationality’s ‘evolutionary aim’ to be ‘control over action’ (23). The reading strategy is thus to take Peirce’s notion of inquiry as a valid starting point, with its emphasis on action control, but without taking on board Peirce’s priority of science’s search for truth as the privileged form of belief fixation. It is in Dewey’s theory of inquiry, however, that Frega finds the most satisfactory, naturalistically based idea of practical rationality. The essentials of the theory, Frega points out, is presented already in Dewey’s 1915 essay “The Logic Judgement of Practice” where judgement is taken in a non-representational and holistic sense to concern a ‘situation as a complex whole that includes the agent and his deeds’ (51). Frega shows how judgement cannot be reduced to ‘canonical forms of analysis and synthesis’ (52) but has ‘an articulative and transformative nature’, involving a ‘self-expressive and self-transformative dimension’ (52). Reasoning has a role to play, but is now seen as ‘the controlling factor that qualifies human agency’ (56) through articulation of a situation, and accomplishing a “(self)transformation” through forming ‘a standard of valuation’ (63) adequate for the situation at stake. The evaluative aspect of judgement, instituting, not merely applying, standards, further concerns how actual or possible consequences of action are assessed: consequences are not simply assessed according to fixed or given ends, interests and desires; ends, interest and desires are rather (re)shaped through reflecting on, and articulating, practical consequences (62–3).

In the second part of the book, the author develops his conception of practical rationality by complementing Dewey’s contribution through current thinkers such as Stanley Cavell and Charles Taylor. Dewey’s account of the holistic, articulative nature of judgement is thus developed in terms of expressive inquiry: a process of expressing one’s moral beliefs and attitudes which is typically occasioned by moral disagreement. Articulation and self-expression in a situation of moral disagreement may be qualified as rational since, as Cavell’s analysis shows, agents may succeed in articulating ‘a shared system of presuppositions’ (84), or, in less happy cases, be lead to ‘accept disagreement as the result of a difference in forms of life’ or go on to ‘critically revise’ their moral attitudes and beliefs (85). In the last section of part two, in chapter four, the author makes a bold transition to the political sphere: the conception of expressive inquiry is adapted and applied to normative conflicts that emerge on a larger scale and that concern relations between groups or sections of society. This move facilitates a return to Dewey’s work and to The Public and Its Problems in particular. Through a sweeping yet pointed comparison Frega defends a Deweyan understanding of...