>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: There are founders. And in the case of pragmatism the founders are
Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.
[music]
>> JOSEPH MARGOLIS: We have these three figures, the founders of American pragmatism, Peirce,
James, and Dewey, who, as far as I can make out, by and large had no use for one another.
[laughs]
>> VINCENT COLAPIETRO: A philosophical tradition, much like any other human tradition, is an
extended family quarrel. Now, who most properly or effectively represents the legacies, the
familial legacies, is the matter of an ongoing debate.
>> RICHARD BERNSTEIN: Most of the significant philosophers know each others, have personal
relations.
James is a good friend of Peirce.
Dewey goes to Johns Hopkins. He studied when Peirce was there although he wasn't very
much influenced. Mead is a close associate. So there is a great deal of personal relations
among the figures that are prominent figures.
>> JAMES CAMPBELL: There are people who claim that Peirce founded pragmatism and Peirce's
seminal articles are the ones that gave pragmatism a bump and that Peirce was the person who
trained James as best James could be trained and the person who taught logic to Royce and
the person who did actually teach Dewey and so on. So he was the one and his position
should be, then, Peirce as the founder of pragmatism with James and Dewey as his main
first generation students. And then everybody else.
But historically that makes no sense at all.
>> JOSEPH MARGOLIS: You know, Peirce says of James,
Or he thinks it because Peirce was his benefactor. He couldn't very well say too much against
him.
>> RICHARD RORTY: James had, it seems to me, an exceptionally generous spirit.
He was always bringing in wretched people and trying to help them.
He sent money to Peirce. He backed up people like Shadworth Hodgeson and Benjamin Blood,
obscure figures whom he did his best to bring to public attention and make prominent.
When the United States invaded the Philippines, he burst with outrage and made speech after
speech about McKinley's betrayal of the country's ideals.
He was always responsive to the needs of people in trouble, whether it was the Filipinos who
were being massacred by the American Army or some poor wretched amateur philosopher
whose ideas needed to be brought forward before the public.
>> JOSEPH MARGOLIS: This guy is spoiling the whole line of thought which I was trying to
organize of which I gave only an inkling when I published these first papers on The Fixation
of Belief, for example.
That kind of thing. There were about five or six papers that he had planned to publish
more or less at the same time.
And in those papers I never gave out my theory of science.
And that's why I didn't talk about truth.
That's really what he's conveying.
I was only talking about the fixation of belief and the meaning of meaning.
This fool, James, he is a fool is I think what Peirce is saying. When he puts his hand
to defining truth he makes such a mess of it that nobody in his right mind would ever
defend it.
Not only is that true, but of course that opportunist over there in England got on his
horse and savaged James for his definition.
James was so upset by this that he worked his tail off to correct the mistakes and he
never quite carried it off.
And Dewey who liked James much more than Peirce, when he comes to write a kind of penny history
of how pragmatism got going mentioned, obliquely, James' mismanagement of this question, but
finesses it. And he offers something which is, however vague, is better than what James
actually says. As we know Dewey was aware that he couldn't use truth criterially so
he introduces the notion of warranted assertability, as he calls it. By which he meant the conditions
under which I assign a truth value to what I believe now under the condition that I can
change my mind if the evidence tells me I should.
If I say this is true at time t and I have to change myself then it turns out that what
I said was true would have been false at a later time and that is simply an embarrassment.
Nobody wants to say that.
So Dewey fiddled with this thing in a way but he didn't want to offend the memory
of James and he pulls his punches there, I would say.
>> JAMES CAMPBELL: My history of pragmatism would start off with Ben Franklin and then
this cluster of characters, primarily Emerson but also Thoreau and Whitman and I think Abe
Lincoln, you know. And then the next figure is James and the next figure is Dewey and
the next figure is Peirce. And I think historically that makes perfect sense.
Because Peirce came to life in '32. 33. 34. When all those volumes started coming
out and people began to read that. I mean, everyone knew about this sort of Peirce guy,
you know, and there had been occasional volumes of edited material about Peirce.
And even some of his essays had been put out.
But until the big volumes came out, the collected papers, he was a minor figure.
>> JOSEPH MARGOLIS: Now, Peirce apparently wrote a letter to Dewey which he never posted
>> DOUG ANDERSON: As Charles Pierce, the founder of American pragmatism used to say "no philosopher
in his right mind ever tells the whole truth." He never tells everything that he or she believes
because it's gonna come back to haunt you.
There are cultural constraints.
>> JOSEPH MARGOLIS: In which, we have the letter, it's been cited, I haven't seen
it but I've seen the citation from the letter, and it says, in effect, Look, John Dewey,
I've read some of your logical essays. By the way, you know that Dewey sat in a class
of Peirce's at Johns Hopkins University. It never seems to take but nevertheless.
He says to Dewey, I'm not sure you understand what negation is.
When you characterize it in your early papers you talk about some of these logical issues.
I would swear that you don't know one end from the other. Ok?
He never sent him that letter but I'm inclined to think that Peirce was right about James.
He was inept. His impulses were inept, professionally, but he was not stupid so when he saw the mistake
he was prepared to work hard to make amends.
And, in fact, his theories had immense influence in America.
I think it's not negligible that the pragmatist that Hilary Putnam was most attracted to was
William James.
>> JAMES CAMPBELL: I think one of the reasons why there's been a rebirth in interest in
Peirce and a rebirth in interest in pragmatism is that this new conception of Peirce and
pragmatism works reasonably well with the inherited analytic model that we've got.
You know, this sort of realism. Philosophy's job is to find out what is true.
And that's not the model of James. That's not the model of Dewey. That's not the model
of Emerson, Franklin.
But it's the model that philosophy seems to have adopted. So our job is to find out
what is true and there's a lot of machinery in Peirce to do that.
And there's also a lot of interest in Peirce about doing that, you know? Not much about
social problems. Not much about personal problems. But a lot about truth.
[thud]