Pragmatic realism

After analysing Habermas' philosophical evolution from his theory of interests to his late pragmatic realism ((), I will focus on the problems of this last conception ((), trying to draw a plausible way out which avoids both naturalistic reductionism and a too weak form of realism ((). While doing so I will focus on the concept of objectivity, highlighting the problems that come from Habermas' approach to it. I suggest a gradual approach to objectivity and realism as a possible way out from Habermas' impasse. is is also compatible with Habermas' critical theory as it keeps for truth the role of an opening device for social and theoretical discussions.

One feature of Sellars’s ‘philosophical’ semantics (EAE ¶¶40, 67) concerns ‘synthetic necessary truths’ (SM 2:53, 3:18–19), a direct successor to C. I. Lewis’s (MWO, 1929: 227–9, 254–8) relativised pragmatic a priori. Following Reichenbach, Lewis and Parrini, I argue (briefly) that the relativised synthetic a priori required for natural science cannot be merely linguistic (§3). I then argue in detail that the relevant, relativised synthetic a priori cannot be merely meta-linguistic (§§4–7). So doing identifies the key distinction between empiricism and pragmatism; the role of that distinction in contrasting Lewis’s robust pragmatic realism in MWO (1929) to his empiricist relapse in AKV (1946); the key contrast between the robust pragmatic realism of Classical American pragmatism and meta-linguistically inclined neo-pragmatism; and shows that Brandom’s (2015) inferentialist semantics is neo-pragmatist, not pragmatically realist; and that Sellars developed his philosophical semantics on behalf of robust pragmatic realism. Unlike Brandom, Sellars made his way back to robustly realist classical pragmatism by attending closely to Carnap’s use of his formal semantics and its methodological links to Carnap’s explication of conceptual ‘explication’. Carnap’s explication of ‘explication’ reconnects to Lewis’s pragmatic realist semantics in MWO. (Draft: 07.11.15)

This paper re-examines how C.I. Lewis’s pragmatic realism in Mind and the World Order (1929, ‘MWO’) contrasts to logical empiricism, and to Lewis’s later An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (1946, ‘AKV’), to highlight several important philosophical points Lewis clearly understood and argued for in MWO, which we need to recover today. MWO is expressly an ‘Outline of a Theory of Knowledge’; nevertheless, it provides several important lessons about human knowledge, action and our worldly context. These are highlighted by contrast to some key points in Carnap’s empiricist semantics (§2) and by considering a point important to scientific realism, not properly accommodated by Carnap’s semantics: Reichenbach’s (1920, 1922) ‘coördination’ (Zuordnung) principles – a very important point about scientific measurement procedures, central both to Peirce and to MWO (§3). These coördinating principles for exact scientific measurements highlight the contrast between the meta-linguistic ‘relative a priori’ admissible by empiricist semantics (Friedman 1999, 2001), and Lewis’ robustly realist ‘pragmatic a priori’ in MWO. I re-examine key features of MWO (§4), including Lewis’s rejection of mythical givenness and of a series of false dichotomies which still plague current discussions of epistemology, pragmatism and history and philosophy of science.

In this paper I present a positive progressive picture of Putnam's philosophy. According to this way of seeing things, Putnam is a normative cartographer of our linguistic practices who has over time refined his understanding of the concepts of truth and verification and their complex relationship from discourse to discourse. Looked at in this way Putnam is primarily a philosopher of objective normativity, who explores the various conceptions of objectivity with which we operate as well as resisting the excesses of both metaphysics and skepticism which do violence to our ordinary and scientific practices. However, Putnam also sees himself as a philosopher of 'reality' focused on " the realism issue " , a metaphysically inflationary way of thinking that, I argue, stands in the way of his deepest insights.

This article examines how Quine and Sellars develop informatively contrasting responses to a fundamental tension in Carnap’s semantics ca. 1950. Quine’s philosophy could well be styled ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism’; his assay of radical empiricism is invaluable for what it reveals about the inherent limits of empiricism. Careful examination shows that Quine’s criticism of Carnap’s semantics in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ fails, that at its core Quine’s semantics is for two key reasons incoherent and that his hallmark Thesis of Extensionalism is untenable. The tension in Carnap’s semantics together with Quine’s exposure of the severe limits of radical empiricism illuminate central features of Sellars’s philosophy: the fully general form of the myth of givenness, together with Sellars’s alternative Kantian characterisation of understanding; the full significance of Carnap’s distinction between conceptual analysis and conceptual explication, and its important methodological implications; the specifically pragmatic character of Sellars’s realism; and Sellars’s methodological reasons for holding that philosophy must be systematic and that systematic philosophy must be deeply historically and textually informed. This paper thus re-examines this recent episode of philosophical history for its philosophical benefits and systematic insights.
Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy 3.8 (2015):1-66; doi: 10.15173/jhap.v3i8.42.  http://jhaponline.org

In 1972 J. Habermas develops a ``consensualist'' theory of truth valid for both the social and the objective world. Over the years, he has acknowledged that the objective world differs from the social one for at least one point: the objective world is not reducible to what people can affirm about it, even if it comes from an ``ideal speech situation''. With this issue, he points out a sharp distinction that reminds us that there are other dimensions over the consensual one and these dimensions can put constraints on the freedom of our consensus. Analyzing the relationship that we (as speakers and actors) have with the objective world I set up a pragmatic realism that aims to explain the limits of our pragmatic relationship with the objective world through an external dimension, radicalizing its evidence with respect to Habermas's formulation.