Alan Saunders: North America has a rich philosophical history, going all the way back to the 18th century. But there is one philosophy that was actually devised there. It hit the ground running in the second half of the 19th century, and in many respects it's still with us. It's called pragmatism, and that's what we're talking about this week on The Philosopher's Zone. Hi, I'm Alan Saunders.

This way of thought has been hugely influential in many areas. The philosophy of science, logic, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, ethics, aesthetics, the philosophy of religion and even public administration. And to talk about this very American subject, I'm joined this week by an Australian. He does, however, now teach at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he's Distinguished Professor in the philosophy program. Peter Godfrey-Smith, welcome to The Philosopher's Zone.

Peter Godfrey-Smith: Thanks very much.

Alan Saunders: I suppose the right way to begin a discussion of pragmatism is with the man who more or less invented it, Charles Sanders Peirce. But I want to start instead with his friend and colleague William James, who in 1907 delivered some lectures on pragmatism. And in these lectures, he distinguishes between the tender-minded and the tough-minded. The tender-minded are rationalistic, they go by principles; the tough-minded are empiricists, they go by facts. And so it continues: intellectualism versus sensationalism, idealism versus materialism, and very interestingly dogmatism on the tender-minded side versus scepticism among the tough-minded.

And he writes, "The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself, but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear."

So, we have Bostonians on the one hand and Rocky Mountain toughs on the other. And he really seems to have thought that pragmatism would be a philosophy that would unite the two. So it's a new philosophy for a new society, America. Is that right, do you think?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: Yes, I think that's right. James was in some ways one of those philosophers who was sceptical about the power of pure arguments, and he thought that the big philosophical systems are very much the products of the temperaments of human beings. And he saw often very elaborate and extravagantly devised, carefully argued systems as very much indicative of the personalities and the cast of mind of individuals, and he wanted to, not just generate a new philosophy, but also describe a kind of outlook and personality that he thought of as appropriate and healthy for the time.

Alan Saunders: Well, let's turn to Charles Sanders Peirce, who in 1879 was appointed Lecturer in Logic at the new Johns Hopkins University. He was first a scientist, and then a philosopher whose work was of enormous range and richness, but we'll just concentrate on the pragmatism. Now, he and William James were members of something called the Metaphysical Club. And that's where pragmatism began as a movement. Can you tell us about that?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: Sure. It was a pretty informal group of people who met in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1870s. For some time, including quite recently, people wondered, the historians wondered, if this thing ever actually existed, because there's very few concrete records of it. And at least one historian suspected it didn't, that, I mean, Peirce had a very tragic life, and in some ways the Metaphysical Club was exactly how he wanted to live his life, in this community of intelligent and critical men. And some have wondered whether it really existed, but it's now become clear that it did exist. It was a group of people that included William James, a very interesting man called Chauncey Wright, who was a polymath like Peirce himself, some eminent lawyers, and they met in Cambridge, just for a few years, but they did do some remarkable things there.

Alan Saunders: This is Cambridge Massachusetts.

Peter Godfrey-Smith: That's right.

Alan Saunders: Now, one of Peirce's recipes for pragmatic thinking is, "Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the object of your conception to have. Then your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object." He wasn't the most elegant of writers. What does that mean?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: It's very hard to work out exactly what that means. I think, myself, that the best way to approach the basic principles of pragmatism is with a principle that Peirce also endorsed in material surrounding that quote, where he said that the content of belief is determined by the effect of the belief on how a person would act. And the contents of ideas that we might entertain, or believe, is entirely determined by their consequences for our actions in a practical context.

Now, the quote you just read out I think of as a somewhat tortured expression of that idea. It's a little bit like a hybrid of that idea, which was genuinely new, I think, the idea that we should think of the meaning of an idea in terms of its consequences for action. That idea, which was new, and a bunch of somewhat older ideas having to do with the thought that, if I think to myself of what I mean by wine, for example (that was one of Peirce's examples), the meaning of that concept has to do with some sensations that I might imagine on encountering wine in various contexts: seeing it, drinking it and so on. So, I think that the heart of Peirce's philosophy in this area was the idea that beliefs are expressed in action; think of meaning in terms of its relationship to action. And this was a famously obscure expression of that, in part because it was tied up a little in earlier philosophical ideas.

Alan Saunders: And something else that he thought we should do is to clarify our conceptions, didn't he?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: That's right. He was influenced in everything he did and thought by his experience as a scientist, and the idea of a gradual increase in clarity and precision and accuracy of measurements, about estimations of important quantities, such as something he worked on himself was the exact strength of gravity. The idea of achieving gradually clarity in thought and accuracy in measurement - that was the sort of ideal that guided much of Peirce's work in this area. Now, he didn't think that you could achieve clarity in the way that earlier philosophers often did. So, Descartes was a sort of foil for Peirce. He thought...

Alan Saunders: Clear and distinct ideas, in Descartes.

Peter Godfrey-Smith: Right, and that very sort of introspective and individualistic approach took issues like that. Peirce was opposed: he wanted to impose a sort of gradualist and social model of those things, which Descartes approached in a more individualistic and introspective way.

Alan Saunders: Let's turn to Peirce the man. He had a rather sad end, didn't he?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: The second half of his life was a disaster. He started off in eccentric but very promising form. He was the son of a very famous mathematician, he went to Harvard, and impressed people early. And, in part because of his impossible personality, he alienated most of his supporters. James, who was ever patient and ever supportive was an exception here. But most people who mattered, Peirce alienated. He was unorthodox in his personal affairs, his health was also a bit of a disaster, in part because, like a lot of people, but more than many at that time, he took a lot of drugs: morphine and cocaine- type drugs. And he just wrecked his life, during the second half of his life, and died sad and obscure.

Alan Saunders: And there was a curious distinction between James and Peirce in their attitudes to what we might call the social world, wasn't there?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: That's right. I think of this as a great irony in the classic pragmatist movement, that everything that Peirce thought was grounded in a concept of a community, a community of enquirers. And he hardly ever had such communities around him. He was socially very difficult and unsuccessful, he was a very lonely man. At one point he sold all his books and, without them, he was completely cut off from even a sort of virtual community, the community of people who had written relevant stuff. He was a social disaster whose theories were more intensely social in structure than almost any philosopher.

Whereas James was an individualist. Communities were optional for James, and the individual and the individual's quirks and temperaments are the most important thing. But James was an enormously successful man socially. He was friends with everybody. He hung out with Ernst Mach and Sigmund Freud, and all the great minds of the day. He couldn't have been more successful socially, whereas Peirce, the social philosopher, could not have been more unsuccessful.

Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National you're with The Philosopher's Zone, and I'm talking this week to Peter Godfrey-Smith about the American philosophical movement, pragmatism.

Now, Peter, if we turn properly to William James, brother, of course, to the novelist Henry, one thing I think we have to say is that, compared to Peirce, he's a much more winning writer, isn't he?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: A wonderful writer. He was a writer whose personality just shines through. Even his more technical writing. He was just a very human philosopher.

Alan Saunders: I do, though, sometimes wonder whether the clarity of his writing actually obscures the often genuine difficulty of what he has to say.

Peter Godfrey-Smith: I think that's right, and I think it happens for a particular reason, which is that James cares ... what he wants to do is communicate and get the thrust of his ideas across. And he did have subtle ideas, but he would much rather that he got the reader on side with respect to the basic themes, whether or not the subtleties came across entirely. He was someone who was trying to reach out and just express his ideas in a way that would actually, you know, get hold of people. Peirce was a completely uncompromising writer. He never made any concessions to the reader. And as a consequence was not able to reach out and make much contact.

Alan Saunders: Now, what was his theory of truth? He defined true beliefs, didn't he, as those that prove useful to the believer?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: That's right. And I think this was one of the less helpful moves that James made in the development of his systematic philosophy. And in the last years of his life he wrote lots of long essays trying to defend this idea against fairly straightforward and obvious objections. I mean, if it was really the case that when we called an idea true, all we could be meaning by that claim was that it was useful, then it wouldn't make sense to ask a question like this: 'Well, this idea has been very useful, but is it really true?' And that would have a kind of internal tension in it. Now, there are moves you can make in response to that, you can say something like, 'Well, we asked that question, what we're wondering is whether the idea will remain useful in the long term.' And then you could have a long argument about whether it makes sense to say, 'Such and such an idea has been useful, in the very long term, and will be so indefinitely, but nonetheless I wonder whether it's true.' Now, to me and to most philosophers it does make sense to ask that question. So whatever else we might mean by truth in normal discourse, we don't just mean something involving its usefulness.

Alan Saunders: And what was this notion of the cash value of an idea? Cash value, of course, is a phrase that's still current in philosophy.

Peter Godfrey-Smith: That's right. For James, I think we can see that as usefully linking back to Peirce. So, we talked a few minutes ago about the idea that the pragmatists thought that the meaning of a belief, or some other, or the proposition generally, should be understood in terms of its consequences for action. And so for James an idea has cash value if it can be acted on in a way that makes a difference to your life, and if those consequences actually lead to something that's worthwhile.

Alan Saunders: And what is the will to believe?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: James published an essay and a collection before he actually began calling himself a pragmatist. And there are interesting published works on the will to believe before he adopted the label pragmatist. And there are interesting questions about the relationship between that early James and the James who signed on to Peirce's pragmatism. The idea of the will to believe is the idea that there are certain decisions in life where evidence is not sufficient to decide the matter, but we have to make a decision. We can't just remain neutral. And then we should just leap in one direction or the other. We should just decide to go one way or the other. And James wanted to have an attitude of that sort towards religion. He thought that some kind of religious hypothesis cannot be proven, its negation can't be proven. He's talking about a rather abstract, not very traditional religious hypothesis. Something about the ultimate purposefulness of the universe. And he thought that a person could legitimately decide to just bet on that. To push themselves into a commitment in that direction.

Alan Saunders: What does he bring to pragmatism that wasn't in Peirce?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: I think that with respect to the central theoretical ideas, Peirce expressed the two most important ones himself, and James didn't add anything absolutely central. So, the two central ones are the idea of a relationship between belief and action, as the foundation for an analysis of things like belief and meaning and so on, and an analysis of truth in terms of some kind of goodness, or some kind of believability at the end of enquiry. That was Peirce's preferred formulation. Now, those two ideas are in Peirce and James didn't contribute anything of that size.

What James did do was take pragmatism and make it into a philosophy that made contact with human beings. Peirce, as we've been discussing, is this very dry and abstract thinker. There's a nice phrase that Peirce used about his own personality. He called himself 'a very snarl of twine,' which is a perfect expression. James is this marvellously outgoing and effective human being, who is able to successfully make people think that pragmatism offered something. Not just to professional philosophers, but to people trying to sort of make their way through questions of a, you know, intellectual nature, but of a character that involves one's decisions about how to live one's life.

Alan Saunders: Turning to the last of the trio of early great pragmatists, John Dewey: he didn't die until 1952, but he studied at Johns Hopkins under Peirce, didn't he?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: That's right. In thinking about Dewey's life, I think it's helpful to picture the America he lived in at the beginning and the America he lived in at the end of his life. So he was brought up in small town Vermont, with horses and carts, and he died in the middle of New York City in 1952, with skyscrapers. So he really had a life that bridged this crucial period in the development of America.

Alan Saunders: He called his philosophy not pragmatism, but instrumentalism. What did he mean by that?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: He used lots of labels for his philosophical views. He eventually came to call himself a naturalist, and called his philosophy naturalistic empiricism. I think of those as the best labels, but instrumentalism is not bad. He wanted to argue that we should think of our faculties for investigating, our faculty for believing, all of those sorts of things, as tools. He had a problem-solving orientation towards the big questions about the nature of belief and justification and so on. So, the idea of enquiry as an instrument, and knowledge as an instrument, is what he's trying to capture there.

Alan Saunders: He claimed that there had been a persistent downgrading of the reality of relations in much of the Western philosophical tradition. So, what was his problem there with the tradition?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: This is a point where I find myself very much on Dewey's side, and I'm not someone who works a lot in the history of philosophy. And when I read Dewey's constant claims that earlier philosophers don't take relations seriously... Relations includes spatial relations, I mean, we're roughly, a sort of metre or so apart, we're in a particular location, things happen before and after each other, those are all relations. The idea of trying to treat those sorts of things as second-rate with respect to their reality seems very strange. But a lot of philosophers did. Aristotle's a good example, it's also true of Locke. A lot of philosophers thought of relations as in some way dependent on our ideas, even when the intrinsic qualities or properties of things might not be dependent in that way on our ideas. And Dewey thought of that as a huge mistake. And I agree with him. I think that is a huge mistake.

Alan Saunders: When a scientific theory posits a swarm of atoms in explaining a physical structure of the kind we would ordinarily call a table, Dewey's happy with that, isn't he? Presumably because of his belief in relations.

Peter Godfrey-Smith: That's exactly how he wants to treat problems of that character. So, in Dewey's time there was much discussion of the question, 'Which is the real table?': the table that's solid, that has a sort of flat uniform surface, or the table that the physicist tells us is there, which is mostly empty space? And it was normally, it was often, thought you had to choose between those tables, and Dewey wanted to have his cake and eat it too in this area. And he thought that his commitment to the reality of relations would help him to have both tables.

Now, on this point I don't agree with Dewey. I think he thought that criticising the downgrading of relations was almost a general purpose rebuttal of certain kinds of standard philosophical manoeuvres. So, one philosopher says, 'The table consists mostly of empty space.' Another philosopher says, 'The table is a solid object.' Dewey thinks that they're arguing with each other because they fail to appreciate that the scientific description is concerned with relations, and the other description is not. But I don't think that's true, I think that both the scientific description and the more commonsense, everyday description are concerned to describe a mixture of relations, and intrinsic features of the object. So I don't agree with Dewey that you can dissolve these questions by insisting on the reality of relations.

Alan Saunders: But you can have both tables, can't you? Because we do have both tables.

Peter Godfrey-Smith: Yes, I think the right resolution of that family of questions has to be of the form, 'We can have both tables.' I don't think that Dewey's way of trying to have both tables was quite right.

Alan Saunders: He also wants to say that much of our experience of the world is not a matter of knowing it. That there are other ways of interacting with things that don't really involve knowing.

Peter Godfrey-Smith: That's right. This was an area where Dewey wanted to press certain commonsense facts upon the philosophers, and I am very sympathetic with his move here. So, Dewey says that if you read a lot of standard philosophical discussions ... I mean, suppose you came down from Mars, and you just read these things and hadn't watched people doing anything, you might come away with the impression that people never eat anything, they never bump into objects, they never have any kind of commerce or contact with things except of a very intellectual kind. And Dewey insisted rightly that the parts of our lives that we think of as the intellectual parts or the cognitive parts are mixed in, embedded within, a larger matrix of non-epistemic, or non-intellectual interaction with objects, where bumping into things and eating things and picking things up are all examples of that.

Alan Saunders: Finally, what is the legacy of pragmatism to American philosophy? I mean, in many respects it's still there, isn't it?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: It's there in many different forms. You get periods in American philosophy where pragmatism becomes a desirable label, and periods and contexts in which it becomes an undesirable label. And I think often you get some distortion of the meaning of the term as a consequence of that. In recent decades the man who did the most to put pragmatism back in the forefront of discussion was Richard Rorty, who died a couple of years ago. Very important philosopher. And he, I think, did, in some ways, distort things a little, because he looked at the pragmatists, but especially Dewey, especially Dewey, and thought of them as criticising the whole business of giving large-scale theories in philosophy. He thought of Dewey as a very unsystematic, a sort of anti-theory philosopher, and Rorty himself was an anti-theory philosopher, so Dewey was someone he wanted to enlist. I think of it as quite misleading, I think, that Dewey was a systematic philosopher, and that Rorty was in some ways trying to make Dewey into a figure like Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein really was an anti-theorist in philosophy. He thought that large-scale philosophical theories were essentially confused, and, if one was to give a kind of diagnosis of what was going on there, I think it had partly to do with this. So, Rorty was a progressive politically, and Dewey was the great American progressive politically. Very important man in American politics. Wittgenstein was a strange reactionary mystic, so for Rorty to be constantly calling on the Wittgenstein connection was sort of awkward for him. And there are themes in Dewey that have some of this very critical, anti-philosophical character to them, but I think that Rorty tried to make Dewey into a kind of a progressive Wittgenstein, if that makes any sense.

Alan Saunders: Peter Godfrey-Smith, thank you very much for that tough-minded introduction of pragmatism.

Peter Godfrey-Smith: Thank you.

Alan Saunders: Peter Godfrey-Smith is distinguished professor in the philosophy program at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Don't forget our website, abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone, which is the place to go if you want to make a comment on this week's show, or find out more about pragmatism. The Philosopher's Zone is produced by Kyla Slaven, the sound engineer is Charlie McCune, I'm Alan Saunders, and I'm off now to find some Rocky Mountain toughs to whom I can display my tender-mindedness.