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Seven Like Bridges without Piers: Beyond the Foundationalist Metaphor CHARLENE HADDOCK SI~IGFRIED Foundational metaphors have long been privileged in philosophical writing. They have seduced even pragmatists. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, for instance, selected the following sentence from Charles Sanders Peirce as a fitting opening for their multivolume collection of his writings: "To erect a philosophical edifice that shall outlast the vicissitudes of time, my care must be, not so much to set each brick with nicest accuracy, as to lay the foundations deep and massive." 1 No false modesty mars Peirce's ambition to provide the basis for the human and physical sciences: "The undertaking which this volume inaugurates is to ... outline a theory so comprehensive that, for a long time to come, the entire work of human reason" in all the various disciplines "shall appear as the filling up of its details." Even William James, who is best remembered for his iconoclastic outbursts, was not immune to such foundationalist ambitions. He states emphatically in ThePrinciples ofPsychology,for instance, that "conceptual systems which neither began nor left off in sensations would be like bridges without piers." 2 He literally speaks of grounding knowledge by plunging explanatory systems "into sensation as bridges plunge their piers into the rock." This reads like the traditional empiricist belief that thought is incomplete until resolved into the listable rock" of sensations.' 143 144 CHARLENE HADDOCK SEIGFRIED Furthermore, on a realist pragmatic reading, the truth is found when hypotheses are confirmed by attaining their anticipated sensible outcomes, if not in every case, then in the long run. But something happens to foundationalism as the pragmatists develop their insights. The context from which the James fragment is taken, for instance, precludes interpreting sensation as a bit of positivistic sense data, just as 'truth' does not mean a univocal relation or refer to 'the truth' as such. Why, then, the solid appeals to a rock-bottom grounding? Like Nietzsche, pragmatists often continue to use terms bequeathed to them by the philosophical tradition after having radically reinterpreted and revalued their meanings. The undertow of the original meanings, however, sometimes pull them beneath the surface. James recognized this danger: "Since the days of the greek [sic] sophists these dialectic puzzles have lain beneath the surface of all our thinking like the shoals and snags in the Mississippi river." 4 However, he himself did not altogether escape the seduction of foundationalism. He developed the tools needed to see through the siren attractiveness of foundationalist promises and even built a pragmatic raft by means of which we could stay afloat, but he still dangled his feet below the water. Like Peirce, he hoped some day to stand on solid ground. As long as we remain on the surface and reflect on phenomenal appearances, the distinction between appearance and reality does not even arise. But as soon as we seek to relate these appearances to their underlying reality, then we enter into the endless and unproductive disputes that have characterized the philosophic tradition . Competing criteria are given for separating appearances from reality and for grounding legitimate claims in the reality so designated . The originality of pragmatism consists in bypassing this unproductive move by staying on the phenomenal level and demonstrating that true appearances can be distinguished from false ones without one's ever appealing to a reality hidden beneath the appearances. Pragmatic analyses are therefore not foundational. But since pragmatists also developed criteria to validate experiential claims, they were not exactly antifoundationalist either. John Dewey clearly signaled the original pragmatic approach by replacing terminology parasitic on a worldview that seeks to ground appearances in reality with the terminology of warranted assertions. As a pioneering figure, James was more ambivalent. LikeBridgeswithout Piers 145 James both dleveloped many cogent criticisms of foundationalist claims grounded in an independent reality and held out the hope that when the false moves were recognized and rejected, then a true account could at last be given. What distinguishes James from many other participants in the long foundationalist debate was that his criticisms of previous formulations were so devastating and his pragmatic method developed in lieu of the finally true grasp of reality was so persuasive that his own yearning for an eventual closure in a fully apprehended reality can be discounted and the radical core developed further. The appeal of foundationalist realism is still so great that some people are attracted to pragmatism precisely because it is taken to be a version of realism that strongly opposes idealism...

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