Philosophy as a Reconstructive Activity: William James on Moral Philosophy
5. I S J AMES ’ S INSISTENCE ON THE AGENT POINT OF VIEW COMPATIBLE WITH HIS CONSENSUS THEORY OF TRUTH ?
Sometimes philosophers who are a little surprised that I “work on” James have asked me what I have learned from James. Of course, I feel that my debts to James are too long to list in a paragraph. But when I am asked the question, I think more or less immediately of two things: first, the idea that we must not be afraid of offering our own philosophic picture, even though we know that our picture is fallible (and based on “our own ideals”) and that it always needs to be discussed with and by others, seems to me much needed at a time when the image of philosophy as a sort of final authority still dominates so much moral philosophy. It is this aspect of James that I have been stressing in this essay. And second—but not in importance—I have been impressed and strongly influenced by the stress in James on the agent point of view.33
That stress is complementary to the insights I’ve been talking about, the Peircean insights in James. James always has a “we” in mind, his theory of truth is a theory of truth for “us”; various forms of the first-person plural pronoun occur again and again in James. But in James, the emphasis on the “we” is always balanced by an emphasis on the “I.” James simultaneously connects truth with the ideal of rational consensus and insists on our right, indeed our responsibility, to take a stand, an individual stand. Not surprisingly, that too is justified by a pragmatic argument. We will not do as well as we could do in morality unless we are willing to take a stand in advance of the evidence, to commit ourselves to ideas that we
cannot yet intersubjectively validate.34
Of course, James is not the first or the last philosopher to have such an idea. Some years ago I discovered a very interesting paper in which Albrecht Wellmer argues that the emphasis on the agent point of view is actually incompatible with the Habermasian (and Jamesian) idea of ultimate consensus as a necessary and sufficient condition for truth.35
Philosophy as a Reconstructive Activity 41 In this paper, Wellmer begins by discussing the notion of rationality, then criticizes Richard Rorty’s sharp distinction between “rational argument,” operating within a system, and irrational or arational “invention.” The point I just referred to occurs when Wellmer discusses rational consensus as a criterion of truth.36He writes,
What I’ve said comes close to some of the considerations which Habermas has put forward in support of a consensus theory of truth. Truth, according to this theory, is the content of a rational consensus; and a consensus can be called ‘rational’ if it has been achieved under conditions of an ideal speech situation. As I have already indicated above, however, I do not believe that a consensus theory of truth and the peculiar account of discursive rationality which goes with it can be justified. Truth, as I’ve argued elsewhere,37cannot be defined in terms of a rational consensus,
even if truth in some sense implies the possibility of a rational consensus. For to put it in a nutshell: although truth is public, the recognition of truth is always my recognition: i.e. each of us must be convinced by arguments if a consensus is to be called rational. But then the consensus cannot be what convinces us of the validity of a truth claim.
Certainly, we can’t decide if something is true by asking what other people think—by taking votes, taking a poll, and counting the votes. Thus, Wellmer asserts, “Although truth is public, it is not decided on publicly: I
myself have to decide in each single case whether I ought to take an argument
seriously or not, whether an objection is serious or irrelevant, or whether a truth claim has been justified. In short: it is always ‘I myself ’ who has to evaluate what the others say—their truth claims, arguments and objections; and as far as these evaluations are fallible, they cannot become infallible by becoming collective.”38
In one sense, of course, this last remark is too strong (especially the “in each single case”). In practice, once I have decided that certain people are rational, I do accept their consensus for truth on many matters—on what I read in an atlas, on what my doctor tells me, on most scientific matters, etc. But if I myself am one of the sources of the relevant information, one of the people whose task it is to inquire into the matter, then Wellmer is right.
Wellmer is saying that if one is inquiring into whether something is true, e.g., whether there is life in another galaxy, one cannot conduct the inquiry by looking to see if other people are converging on the view that there
is life in the other galaxy; one has to look at the other galaxy, at the astronomical,
42 Hilary Putnam
argument may seem unfair; after all, Habermas, just as much as Peirce and James, thinks of truth as what we converge on if we use the right method (the scientific method in the ordinary “narrow” sense of “scientific method,” in the case of the question “Is there life in the other galaxy?”), not as what we converge on if we use the Method of What Is Agreeable to Reason, for example. But Wellmer’s point is deeper than it looks. For, even if we all use the scientific method, still, as scientists, we do not decide if there is life in the other galaxy by seeing if other scientists are converging on the view that
there is; even in an ideally-scientific community—especially in an ideally-
scientific community—each scientist has to make up his or her own mind. But if “It is true that there is life in the other galaxy” means that other people, using the right method, will converge on the view that there is, then it would be perfectly appropriate to look at other people to determine the truth of the sentence.
But is this argument effective against James? Although, in The
Meaning of Truth, absolute truth is characterized by James as membership
in an “ideal set” of “formulations” on which there will be “ultimate
consensus”39—a very Peircean formulation—James never claims that “ultimate
consensus” is what “true” means. Metaphysics, in James’s view, consists of hypotheses; metaphysical truths are not analytic. On the other hand, even if we take truth to be only contingently identical with “ultimate consensus, provided inquiry is conducted in the right way,” it may seem that the problem Wellmer raises does not wholly go away. For if I ever come to believe, to accept, this “theory of truth,” why should I then not determine if there is life in the other galaxy by investigating the conclusions the others
are coming to, rather than by investigating that galaxy? But this is a question
to which James has an answer.
The answer is that whether an inquiry is conducted in the right way— which, for James, means with attention to concrete fact, and particularly when the inquiry is a moral one, with attention to “the cries of the wounded,” fallibilistically, etc.—is itself a question that cannot be answered from a nonengaged point of view. “I myself ” have to say whether the inquiry is properly conducted or not, and I cannot do this without participating in the inquiry myself. (This would also be Habermas’s answer to Wellmer.40)
While this may meet Wellmer’s objection, there remain serious objections to the theory that being true is the same thing as being part of the “ultimate consensus,” not the least being the possibility that there will
be no ultimate consensus, not even on the question whether there ever was
a conference on “Philosophy, Education and Culture” in Edinburgh. (And Peirce’s counterfactual version of the ultimate consensus theory is even more problematic.)
Philosophy as a Reconstructive Activity 43 We should not, then, accept the Peirce-James view—that truth is to be identified with the tremendously Utopian idea of “the ultimate consensus”— of the theory to be reached (and to become coercive) at the end of indefinitely continued investigation. Nevertheless, a great deal that James wants to deny
should be denied. James is right to tell us that we do not have to think of
truth as presupposing a single—and therefore mysterious—“relation of agreement with reality”—one and the same relation in all cases—or as presupposing some mysterious Absolute—an infinite mind able to overcome the limitations of all limited and finite points of view (as in Absolute Idealism)—or some other piece of transcendental machinery beneath our practice of making and criticizing truth claims that makes that practice possible. Insofar as a general account of truth is possible at all, it seems to me that it was given by Frege: to call any content (any Fregean “thought”) true is to make the very same claim that one makes by asserting that content. (But substitute “sentence” for “content” (Gedanke) in that formula, as today’s “disquotationalists” do, and one loses the entire point Frege was trying to make!) Frege’s point was not that “true” is just a word that we attach to marks and noises41 that we assert, but that what connects descriptive judgments
to the world is the content of those judgments; a descriptive judgment is intrinsically about some part or aspect of the world—that’s what makes it the judgment it is. To think of a judgment as a mere representation that has to be put into “correspondence” with the world is a disastrous error. But Frege’s point also applies to judgments that are not descriptions—to mathematical judgments, normative judgements, etc., to give an account of “truth in mathematics,” or “truth in ethics,” etc., what is required is to give an account of the content of mathematical, ethical, etc. judgments; or, as Wittgenstein would have put it—eliminating any lingering metaphysical moments in Frege’s thought—of what we do when we make mathematical, ethical, etc. claims—but without succumbing to the temptation to think that an account of “what we do” must be a reductive account.42
In short, we must not think that rejecting metaphysical accounts of truth is the same as rejecting the notion of truth (or treating it as a mere “adjective of commendation”). On the contrary, giving up the idea that there must be a single metaphysical account that (simultaneously) accounts for the use of “true” in ethics as well as in particle physics, in connection with the tables and chairs as well as in connection with works of art, in religion as well as in cooking, can and should free us to see that we need no better ground for treating moral assertions as capable of truth and falsity than the fact that we can and do rationally discuss them, that we can and do treat them as capable of warranted assertability and warranted deniability. But to unpack that remark I would have to turn to the writing of yet another pragmatist—John Dewey.43
44 Hilary Putnam
N
OTES1. As so often in the past, once again I owe a debt of gratitude to Ruth Anna Putnam for her criticism of an earlier draft and for her valuable suggestions.
2. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt and Co., first edition 1920, enlarged edition 1948).
3. Ibid., v–vi.
4. All quotes in this paragraph are from ibid., vi–vii.
5. E.g., Rorty has tried hard to connect pragmatism with the rejection of the notion of objective truth, as well as the rejection of any notions of justification that is not purely “sociological,” while Richard Posner and Stanley Fish use “pragmatism” as a label for a form of utilitarianism and for unapologetic opportunism, respectively. 6. Michelle Moody-Adams, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and
Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 176. See epilogue as well.
7. “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” in The Works of William
James; The Will to Believe and Other Essays, Frederick H. Burkhardt and Fredson
Bowers eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). All quotations are from this edition. The opening sentence of the essay (141)—“The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we contribute to the race’s moral life”—is the very point that Michelle Moody-Adams makes in the passage I quoted.
8. Cf. my “James’ Theory of Truth,” in Ruth Anna Putnam ed., The Cambridge
Companion to William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
9. “Moral,” 142. 10. Ibid., 151. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 151–152. 13. Ibid., 145. 14. Ibid., 145–146. 15. Ibid., 146. 16. Ibid.
17. “On Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics,” The Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume LXX (1996): 243–264.
18. See “James’ Theory of Truth” for the evidence for this claim. 19. See “James’ Theory.”
Philosophy as a Reconstructive Activity 45 20. “Moral,” 146–147.
21. Ibid., 148. 22. Ibid., 149.
23. This idea is developed in section III of “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.”
24. See “Pragmatism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, xcv, part 3 (1995): 291–397; also my “James’ Theory of Truth.”
25. “Moral,” 156–157.
26. The first paragraph of “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” runs as follows: “The main purpose of this essay is to show that there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We all help to determine the content of moral philosophy so far as we contribute to the race’s moral life. In other words, there can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say. In the one case as in the other, however, the hypotheses we now make while waiting, and the acts to which they prompt us, are among the indispensable conditions which determine what that ‘say’ shall be” (141).
27. Ibid., 158. 28. Ibid., 158–159.
29. That there is a strong Peircean strain in James’s views on truth is argued in “James’ Theory of Truth.”
30. In “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” and “The Fixation of Belief,” reprinted in Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss eds., The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders
Peirce, vol. 5 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).
31. Although Peirce also argues that the “Method of Tenacity”—which is com- mon to both the appeal to Authority and the appeal to what is Agreeable to Reason— makes “true” little more than an emotive word for beliefs one likes, and this could, perhaps, be regarded as a “conceptual” argument.
32. The Works of William James; Pragmatism, Frederick H. Burkhardt and Fredson Bowers eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 34.
33. See, in particular, the closing pages of my The Many Faces of Realism (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987).
34. “The Will to Believe” and “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in The Works of
William James; The Will to Believe and Other Essays.
35. Albrecht Wellmer, “Intersubjectivity and Reason,” in L. Herzburg and J. Pietanen, eds., Perspectives on Human Conduct (Leiden/New York: E. J. Brill, 1988), 128–163.
46 Hilary Putnam
37. Wellmer is probably referring to his Ethik und Dialog (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986), 69–102.
38. “Intersubjectivity and Reason,” 157–8.
39. The Works of William James: The Meaning of Truth, Frederick H. Burkhardt and Fredson Bowers eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 143– 4.
40. See, for example, Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984) 1: 113 ff. Habermas is discussing the stance that an ideal social scientist must take, but, in his view, this is just the stance that anyone interesting in under- standing for its own sake must take.
41. “Marks and noises” is Rorty’s expression for our assertions, but all “disquotationalists” from Ayer and Carnap on have supposed that “true” is a predicate of such syntactic objects. Tarski’s view, to which they often appeal, is more nuanced: on the one hand, he agrees with them in viewing sentences as syntactic objects, characterizable apart from their meaning—which is a mistake—on the other hand, he presupposes that the terms in our sentences have what he calls “concrete meanings,” and he does not attempt to reduce our grasp of these meanings to the mastery of assertability conditions, as today’s disquotationalists all do. For a detailed discussion of the difference between Frege’s view and the disquotationalist views with which it is so often confused, see my “The Dewey Lectures 1994: Sense, Nonsense and the Senses; An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human Mind,” The Journal of Philosophy XCI, no. 2 (Sept. 1994): lecture III.
42. I discuss the error in reductionist readings of Wittgenstein in my Pragma-
tism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), as well as in the paper cited in the previous note.
43. In these closing sentences I have borrowed from the close of my “Are Moral and Legal Values Made or Discovered,” Legal Theory 1, no. 1 (March 1995): 19.
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