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2013年6月12日水曜日

【メモ】 The American Pragmatists (Cheryl Misak)

Cheryl Misak (2013) The American Pragmatists, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

【第一章 初期アメリカ思想におけるプラグマティズム的諸テーマ】

The fact that we can be surprised suggests that experience is not illusory and the world is not constructed entirely by us. Although we may color the universe, there is something that we are coloring. (p.12) cf. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Works 3: 48

【第二章 Chauncey Wright】

But whatever be the origin of the theories of science, Whether from a systematic examination of empirical facts by conscious induction, or from the natural biases of the mind, the so-called intuitions of reason, what seems probable without a distinct survey of our experiences—whatever the origin, real or ideal, the value of these theories can only be tested ... by an appeal to sensible experience, by deductions from them of consequences which we can confirm by the undoubted testimony of the senses. (Chauncey Wright, Philosophical Discussions p.46)

This is a signal difference between pragmatism and British empiricism. Pramatism is not primarily a view about the sources or origins of belief, but a view of what tests a belief must pass once we have it. It is a view about what it is for a belief to count as non-spurious, genuine, or legitimate. (pp.17-18)

A belief can have consequences for the believer—it can make me feel better, it can influence my train of thought, I can desire it to be true, etc. But that is not the kind of consequence Wright thinks salient. A belief must have consequences not only for the believer, but for the world. The importance of this distinction will amplify as we march through the history of pragmatism. (pp.24-25)

【第三章 Charles Sanders Peirce】

[W]hen Paul Carus associated him [Peirce] with Hume in an article published in The Monist titled "Mr. Charles S. Peirce's Onslaught on the Doctrine of Necessity," Peirce resisted the comparison (Collected Papers 6.605). It is interesting, though, that it was not the empiricism he objected to. It was the nominalist metaphysical underpinnings of it. (p.28)

He [Peirce] did not want to define truth as that which satisfies our aims in inquiry. A dispute about definition, he says, is usually a "profitless discussion" (CP 8. 100). ... The pragmatist is merely getting one fix on the idea of truth. (p.36)

[For Peirce,] a true belief is such that it would withstand doubt, were we to inquire as far as we fruitfully could into the matter. A true belief is such that, no matter how much further we were to investigate and  debate, that belief would not be overturned by recalcitrant experience and argument. Peirce says: "if Truth consists in satisfaction, it cannot be any actual satisfaction, but must be the satisfaction that would ultimately be found if the inquiry were pushed to its ultimate and indefeasible issue" (Collected Papers 5.569; 6.485). (p.37)

We have in our various inquiries and deliberations a multiplicity of aims—empirical adequacy, coherence with other beliefs, simplicity, explanatory power, getting a reliable guide to action, fruitfulness for other research, greater understanding of others, living peacefully with others, increased maturity, and the like. When we say that we aim at the truth, what we mean is that, were a belief really to satisfy all of our local aims in inquiry, then that belief would be true. There is nothing over and above the fulfillment of those aims, nothing metaphysical, to which we aspire. Truth is not some transcendental, mystical thing and we do not aim at it for its own sake. (p.37)

The emotion of surprise is "merely the instinctive indication of the logical situation. It is evolution (φύσις) that has provided us with the emotion" (CP 7.190) (p.39)
→ パースの言う「経験の強制力」は単なる心理的、情緒的な衝動ではない。後者はあくまで進化の産物。(では一体何か?)

What we can say, he [Peirce] thinks, is that the fact that we have only our interpretations of what we experience does not throw us into a sea of arbitrary interpretations, where there is no connection to what is real. Our perceptual judgments, Peirce argues, are indices of our percepts—of the actual clash between us and the world. (p.40)

Peirce ... thinks that we can know something of the world as it exists independently of us—we can know that it is there and that it constrains us. Peirce turns to the idea that we can be mistaken in order to show that there is an objective truth and that reality that [sic] goes beyond what you or I or any collection of people happen to think: "The experience of ignorance, or of error, which we have, and which we gain by means of correcting our errors, or enlarging our knowledge, does enable us to experience and conceive something which is independent of our own limited views" (CP 7.345). (p.40)

This forceful element [of experiential judgements] is our link with a reality, something that goes beyond us: "Now the 'hardness' of fact lies in the insistency of the percept, its entirely irrational insistency, —the element of Secondness in it. That is a very important factor of reality" (CP 7.659). (p.41)

Peirce thinks that the theory of evolution tells us, indeed, that our capacities have been selected for survival, but that, nonetheless, we aim at getting beliefs not merely with survival benefits, but beliefs that are independent of human capacities and contexts of inquiry. (p.41n)

The seemingly unsolvable problem of induction disintegrates once we acknowledge that regularities abound, but only some of them want explanations. Only unexpected or surprising regularities make a demand on us to make an inference to the best explanation. (p.49)
→ 驚きを伴わない規則性は習慣の領域に沈滞している。

"The sole immediate purpose of thinking is to render things intelligible; and to think and yet in that very act to think a thing unintelligible is a self-stultification. It is as though a man furnished with a pistol to defend himself against an enemy were, on finding that enemy very redoubtable, to use his pistol to blow his own brains out to escape being killed by his enemy. Despair is insanity. ... We must therefore be guided by the rule of hope" (CP 1.405)

【第四章 William James】

He [James] notes with approval that Jonathan Edwards thought that it was by the fruits not the roots that we must test our beliefs (The Varieties of Religious Experience p.25). (p.70)

【第五章 Holmes、Royce、Schiller】

[For Holmes, law] is an enterprise of inquiry, or "successive approximation," that starts from precedent and then is driven by experience, conflict, and unanticipated problems. (p.78)

Peirce is adamant, with Royce, that we have to preserve a gap in which error can live. (p.84)
→ パースにおいては、outward clashがこの間隙を保証する。

【第七章 John Dewey】

[For Dewey] A belief has to satisfy the inquirer's needs and it has to satisfy the situation. It is bound to the personal or the psychological but it also has to meet what the situation demands of it. (p.112)

"The way in which men do 'think' denotes ... simply the ways in which men at a given time carry on their inquiries. So far as it is used to register a difference from the ways in which they ought to think, it denotes a difference like that between good and bad farming or good and bad medical practice. Men think in ways they should not when they follow methods of inquiry that experience of past inquiries shows are not competent to reach the intended end of the inquiries in question" (The Later Works 12.107)
 → パースが規範性を未来の探求に求めるのに対して、デューイは過去にそれを見出す。

It is certainly the case that those pragmatists who want to talk about the world and its constraints need to work hard to show how there is some space between their view and that of their realist opponents. We have seen that Peirce opens us that gap by arguing that we have no cognitive access to the world of independent objects—it is only by abstracting the forceful element from experience that we can get an inkling that the world is there. Dewey, on the other hand, needs to work to say why his view remains suflficiently far away from his idealist opponents who have a hard time making sense of the ideas of improvement, mistakes, and standards. (p.119)

"It is the situation that has these traits [vagueness and confusion]. We are doubtful because the situation is inherently doubtful" (The Later Works 12.109)

"The question naturally arises how Professor Dewey comes to have a metaphysics. How does he know that specificity, interaction, change, characterize all existence, and that these distinctions are not merely logical, made for purposes of getting along in this world, but characters of an independent existence? Why does he impute the features presented in human experience to a nature embracing, but containing more than, that experience?" (Ernest Nagel, "Can Logic be Divorced From Ontology?" p.707)

Nagel thinks that we need to distinguish "symbols from the subject-matter to which they point." We have seen that Peirce agrees, although his way of distinguishing these two things is as minimal as possible—all we can do is point or gesture at the subject matter. (p.121)

"Mr. Russell proceeds first by converting a doubtful situation into a personal doubt, although the difference between the two things is repeatedly pointed out by me. I have even repeatedly stated that a personal doubt is pathological unless it is a reflection of a situation which is problematic. Then by changing doubt into private discomfort, truth is identified with removal of this discomfort. The only desire that enters, according to my view, is desire to resolve as honestly and impartially as possible the problem involved in the situation. 'Satisfaction' is satisfaction of the conditions prescribed by the problem. Personal satisfaction may enter in as it arises when any job is well done according to the requirements of the job itself; but it does not enter in any way into the determination of validity, because, on the contrary, it is determined by that validity" (The Later Works 14.156)

Dewey is set against the "intellectualist" account of truth, on which truth is "antecedent to any process of verification" (The Middle Works 4.76).

Another way of putting this disagreement between Peirce and Dewey is to ask whether truth is a static phenomenon. Both reject the idea that truth is static in the sense that our beliefs either mirror the world of the Absolute (and are hence true) or fail to do so (and are hence false). But Peirce thinks that truth is static in the sense that a belief either would or would not survive the rigors of inquiry. Again, Dewey usually stays away from this thought. His interest ends with beliefs that show themselves to resolve a particular, local problem. (p.127)

 【第八章 Mead、Santayana】

He [Santayana] thinks that "in their hearts and lives," Americans are all pragmatists: "Their real philosophy is the philosophy of enterprise." They are optimists who "turn their scorn of useless thought into a glad denial of its existence" ("Apologia Pro Mente Sua" p.248-249 in Paul Schilpp, The Philosophy of George Santayana). He did not want to be associated with the American "business intellect" way of thinking. He preferred the intellectual company of Spinoza and the ancient Greeks. (p.144)

He alludes to the two shortcomings in Dewey's philosophy—the awkward metaphysics and the inability to adjudicate—in one harsh sentence. Dewey remains an idealist with Emerson, Schelling, and Hegel: "romantic, transcendental, piously receiving as absolute the inspiration dominating moral life in their day and country" ("Dewey's Naturalist Metaphysics" p.680). (pp.144-145)

"Living when human faith is again in a state of dissolution, I have imitated the Greek sceptics in calling doubtful everything that, in spite of common sense, any one can possibly doubt. But since life and even discussion forces me to break away from a complete scepticism, I have determined not to do so surreptitiously nor at random, ignominiously taking cover now behind one prejudice and now behind another. Instead I have frankly taken nature by the hand, accepting as a rule in my farthest speculations the animal faith I live by from day to day." (Scepticism and Animal Faith p.308)

Philosophy must begin in the middle of things. We assume that many of our beliefs are true and we need not be pushed into trying to prove those beliefs or show that they are certainly or infallibly true. We do not need Cartesian requirements for certainty. (p.147)

"I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life ; I should not be honest otherwise." (Scepticism and Animal Faith p.vi)

"You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart" ("Three Proofs of Realism" in Essays in Critical Realism p.184)

Santayana and Peirce struggle mightily to articulate the good side of this thought [James's idea of the Will to Believe]. They both argue that we must accept the bulk of our beliefs, but always keep them open to recalcitrant experience and never believe them on grounds extraneous to facts and reasons. This last point is important. Like Peirce, when Santayana uses the word "faith," he does not mean to mark something that is unbacked by reasons. He says that instead of using "so brutal a term as animal faith," he might have used "cognitive instinct, empirical confidence, even practical reason" ("Apologia Pro Mente Sua" p.586). Each of these alternatives makes it clear that there is something normative or non-arbitrary in what we need to assume. (p.148)

"Why does belief that you can jump a ditch help you to jump it? Because it is a symptom of the fact that you could jump it, that your legs were fit and that the ditch was two yards wide and not twenty. A rapid and just appreciation of these facts has iven you your confidence, or at least has made it reasonable, manly, and prophetic; otherwise you would have been a fool and got a ducking for it." ("The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" in The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States p.61)

The encountering of "brute fact" is the "ground" for Santayana's realism ("Apologia Pro Mente Sua"p.504-505). The "experience of shock" "establishes realism"—it establishes "a world of independent existences" (Scepticism and Animal Faith p.142). Santayana does not want to be associated with the pragmatists because he thinks that a pragmatist such as Dewey is "a philosopher of the foreground" ("Dewey's Naturalistic Metaphysics" p.680), too content with the surface of things. (p.148)

【第十章 Clarence Irving Lewis】

With Peirce (and Kant), Lewis takes the given to be that which is not under our control—that which is independent of the mind's constructive activities. (p.183)

[For Lewis] the given is that which impinges upon us or resists our attempts to change it and thus constrains our opinions (this is the set of thoughts he shares with Peirce). There is no need to add that the given is something that has a certain structure or quality. (p.183n)

What Lewis argues is that there must be something constraining the truth and falsity of our statements and beliefs. (p.184)

For Lewis, it is experience—not logic, not conceptual truth—that is brute and compelling. (p.192)
→ ア・プリオリな真理は確かに必然的だが、それのみを受け容れるよう我々を強制するという意味で必然的ではない。そのような意味でbruteなのは経験の抗力。

"What is a priori is necessary truth not because it compels the mind's acceptance, but precisely because it does not. It is given experience, brute fact, the a posteriori element in knowledge which the mind must accept willy-nilly. The a priori represents an attitude in some sense freely taken, a stipulation of the mind itself, and a stipulation which might be made in some other way if it suited our bent or need. Such truth is necessary as opposed to contingent, not as opposed to voluntary. "("A Pragmatic Conception of Truth" p.231)

"we cannot capture the truth of experience if we have no net to catch it in" (The Mind and the World Order p.271) → この網がア・プリオリな概念やカテゴリー。それは経験のあり方を規定するから経験から独立なのではなく、経験を規定しない(経験のbrtueな抗力に任せる)からこそ独立。また、この網は一つとは限らず、プラグマティックに選択され得る。Lewisの言葉を使えば、それは"uncompelled initiative of human thought"である。

Lewis rejects the idea, again sometimes found in James, that "new truth" replaces "old truth." When a new belief replaces an overturned belief, that should suggest that the old belief was false, not an old truth. ... An assertion always "outruns" our current evidence and best thinking. It reaches into the future and makes a prediction that the evidence and best thinking will continue to support the assertion. This, of course, is the Peircean conception of truth. (p.194)

【第十一章 Willard van Orman Quine】

[T]he insight of disquotationalism is precisely the insight of pragmatism. Both hold that when we assert that p is true, what we are doing is asserting p. The Peircean pragmatist modifies this shared thought slightly, not wanting to limp around with warranted belief. When we assert that p is true, what we are doing is asserting p and asserting that p would remain assertible. ... Both pragmatism and disquotationalism, that is, keep us focused on first-order inquiry. (p.206)

【第十三章 Richard Rorty】

Calling for a dissolution of a dualism, such as that between relativism and absolutism, does not guarantee that one succeeds in escaping the pitfalls of one or the other of the two positions. And it does not guarantee that one will not end up shuttling between the two disliked positions, depending on the particular critique to which one is responding. That is, after the call for the abandonment of a way of looking at things, one must replace the problematic mode of thinking with a new way that really does undercut the problems endemic in the old way of seeing the issue. One must replace the old dichotomy of "objective standards or no standards at all" with low-profile, non-absolutist conceptions of truth and objectivity which can guide us in our inquiries and deliberations. The pragmatist must replace the old dichotomy with distinctly pragmatist accounts of truth, objectivity, and normativity. (p.231)

Frank Ramsey also held that the pragmatist need not take "p is true" to be identified with "p is useful." For the belief p will be useful only if p. See his "Facts and Propositions." (p.232n)

As [Huw] Price puts it, pragmatists start not by asking what the analytic definition of truth is, but rather, why speakers have the notion of truth they have. They should see, he thinks, that our notion of truth does not line up neatly with warrant asertiblity, nor with disquotation. We need a stronger notion of truth than is provided by either of those notions (Naturalism Without Mirrors p.16). (p.233)

To do without truth is to silence our conversations—both our conversations with others and our internal conversations. For the very essence of the norm of truth is to give disagreement its immediate normative character. It is to make disagreement matter. Without the grit provided by the concept of truth, the wheels of argument do not engage; disagreements slide past one another. (p.234)

【第十四章 Hilary Putnam】

[For Putnam] One cannot dodge the problem of saying what truth is by replacing truth with assertibility and then not saying what assertibility is. And once one says what assertibility is, one is taken to a substantial view of truth. (p.242)

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