The Pragmatic Contextuality of Scheme (In)Dependence

1 The fact that I am in this chapter and in this book formulating my problem from the standpoint of pragmatism should not be taken to imply that the realism issue would not be a problem for non-pragmatists. On the con-trary, our discussion below will be general enough to be relevant to much of post-Kantian philosophy. Note also that I am not here going to settle the interpretive question of what pragmatism is. This is not the right place to provide textual evidence for pragmatists’ commitment to the problem(s) of realism. Different pragmatists, classical or recent, may be committed to it/

them in quite different ways.

2 Realism in this sense can, of course, be applied to universals or to the mind-independent world as a whole; thus, the first and second dimensions of the realism issue could be formulated as special cases of the third.

3 The ‘error theory’ was made famous by Mackie (1977). For a pragmatist dis-cussion of the problem of moral realism in particular, see Pihlström (2005a).

It can also be suggested that methodological realism is a species of norma-tive realism, focusing on methodological normativity in (scientific) inquiry.

4 See Schiller (2008); on relativism in modern philosophy, see, e.g., Baghra-mian (2004).

5 Kenneth R. Westphal has argued, in a series of works since his (1989), that Hegel was ‘the first pragmatic realist’. While Hegel was a major figure in the realism debate and would arguably deserve a ‘milestone’ of his own (between my fourth and fifth milestones), I will not further comment on his views in this chapter.

6 For a now classical antirealistic work, see van Fraassen (1980).

7 In addition, the debate between semantic realism and antirealism, as con-ceived by Dummett and his followers, is another twist in this rearticulation of realism in the (late) twentieth century. See, e.g., Dummett (1978).

8 See, e.g., Kant (1990 [1781/1787]), James (1975 [1907]), Schiller (2008), Dewey (1960 [1929]), Carnap (1950), Wittgenstein (1953), Quine (1980 [1953], 1969), Putnam (1981, 1990), Goodman (1978), Kuhn (1970), Rorty (1979, 1991), and Sellars (1963). However, we must not forget Donald Davidson’s famous critique of such forms of relativism and of the implicated distinction between a conceptual scheme and its allegedly scheme-neutral content, or other noteworthy criticisms of conceptual and ontological rela-tivisms. For Davidson’s seminal critique of the scheme–content distinction and the resulting conceptual relativism, see his (1984); cf. also, e.g., Niini-luoto’s (1999) vigorous attack on cognitive relativism.

9 As in Chapter 1 above, I am assuming an ontological sense of both ence and independence here. Roughly, an entity a is ontologically depend-ent on another depend-entity b, iff a cannot exist unless b exists, that is, b’s existence is required for a’s existence. For example, tropes (or modes) are dependent on the particulars they qualify: if there is no such entity as this particular shirt, its particular shade of red cannot exist (be real) either—unless particu-lars themselves are construed as bundles of tropes. The relevant notion of ontological (in)dependence must be distinguished from causal (in)depend-ence (and of course logical (in)depend(in)depend-ence). A table is causally dependent on its maker’s activities, but when made, it is ontologically independent of them (at least according to realists), because it could remain existing even if its maker disappeared from the world. For more detailed discussions of ontological dependence and independence, see Lowe (1998, 2006). Here I must ignore the differences between, say, Lowe’s ‘rigid’ and ‘non-rigid’

notions of ontological dependence. Lowe’s metaphysically realist (very anti-pragmatist) ontology makes the interesting twist of regarding persons as a metaphysically primitive ground upon which other things are dependent.

Compared to many other contemporary largely materialist forms of meta-physical realism, this is a relatively unorthodox position.

10 Cf. Pihlström (2009). Neither this chapter nor this book argues for the pos-sibility of pragmatist metaphysics but investigates a fundamental problem within it (which is also a problem for pragmatist epistemology), not ade-quately dealt with in my 2009 book.

11 I will from now on simply speak about scheme (in)dependence, instead of, say, mind (in)dependence, practice (in)dependence, language (in)depend-ence, perspective (in)depend(in)depend-ence, or categorization (in)depend(in)depend-ence, just in order to stick to a uniform terminology. Individual thinkers may use dif-ferent expressions here. Also, I will speak about entities, intending this as an extremely broad ontological category ranging over such sub-categories as particulars (individuals), properties (whether universals or tropes), pro-cesses, or even states of affairs. Nothing serious regarding the realism issue I am examining depends on these terminological choices.

12 On the distinction between a (mere) distinction and a (harmful) dichot-omy, see Putnam (2002).

13 Consider, for instance, the ‘problematic situations’ (and ‘indeterminate situations’) Dewey invokes in his account of inquiry and experience. For a classical formulation, see Dewey (1960 [1929]).

14 The key Kantian-cum-pragmatic ‘facts’ about us and our ‘cognitive archi-tecture’, facts defining our finiteness and practice-embeddedness, are truly natural facts, though they at the same time play a transcendental role, com-parable to what may in the Kantian framework be called ‘transcendental facts’ about the irreducible difference between intuitions and concepts, about there being exactly two forms of sensible intuition and twelve cat-egories, about the spontaneous synthesizing power of imagination, about the original synthetic unity of apperception, about the outer affection on our sensibility of the mind-independent causal source of experience, etc.

(Hanna 2001: 118.) Note, however, that Kant himself does not call these (or anything else) ‘transcendental facts’. I am here employing Hanna’s in my view useful terminology, without claiming to interpret Kant’s original views in any manner whatsoever. As Hanna argues, these facts about us are ‘deep’;

they are constitutive and transcendental, not simply accidental or empiri-cal, and they function as ‘ultimate explanatory starting points’ for which no further reasons can be reasonably required (see ibid.: 117–118).

15 See also Chapter 3 for a more comprehensive discussion of why I think the pragmatist should (especially in the philosophy of religion) adopt a Kantian strategy of analysis and argumentation.

16 This might also be cashed out by considering the relation between pragmatic pluralism and contextualism, on the one hand, and the traditional concep-tion of ontology as general category theory, on the other. Pragmatic plu-ralism acknowledges a plurality of categorial structures, or ontologies. The pragmatic pluralisms defended by figures like James, Putnam, or Goodman still employ a set of relatively traditional ontological—albeit epistemologized and to some extent even ethically structured—categories. According to such

thinkers, what the categorial structure(s) of the world is (are) depends on our perspectives and practices, but the set or ‘pool’ of potential structures is still independent of us, at least in some basic metaphysical sense. Quite independently of us, the world could be such that there are, or are not, uni-versals, processes, states of affairs, etc. A more radical pragmatic pluralism would argue that we can construct (a plurality of) novel structures of cat-egories, even previously unheard-of catcat-egories, based on the development of our practices, discourses, and/or forms of life. We can reform our categorial possibilities, not only our postulations of actual categories or structures. An example of this kind of reform would be a revision of the category of divinity in response to the problem of evil. At the meta-level, one might also suggest that the ways of meta-metaphysically determining how to examine the cat-egorial structure of reality (e.g., whether it is epistemic or ethical in addition to being ontological) is itself dependent on our epistemic as well as ethical standpoints. Pragmatism thus prevails at the meta-level. Further develop-ments of these ideas must be left for another occasion, however.

17 Rorty’s neopragmatist way of understanding conceptual development in terms of causal clashes of vocabularies—a version of the survival of the fit-test—is too reductive from the perspective of the kind of pragmatism I am trying to develop. See, e.g., Rorty (1998).

18 For further reflections on this reflexive structure of naturalized and prag-matic transcendental philosophy, see Pihlström (2003, 2009).

19 Gava’s & Stern’s (2016) volume provides a number of scholarly exami-nations of the relations between pragmatism and Kantian transcendental philosophy, as does the more recent collection Skowronski & Pihlström (2019).

20 This is also quoted in Slater (2008: 675).

21 Putnam’s reasoning can be reconstructed as a pragmatic transcendental argument (cf. Pihlström 2003: chapter 7). See the brief discussion in the previous section on the possibility of interpreting pragmatism as a (natural-ized) form of transcendental philosophy.

22 For Putnam’s rejection of the internal realist (epistemic) theory of truth, see Putnam (1999, 2012). For discussions of Putnam’s struggle with realism and pragmatism, see Pihlström (2009).

23 The Wittgensteinian background of this formulation should be obvious.

For some discussion of the possibility of integrating pragmatism and late-Wittgensteinian philosophical methodology, see Pihlström (2006b). I do not want to take any stand on the question of whether it is meaningful at all (either in a Wittgensteinian or, say, Jamesian pragmatist context) to speak about the ‘truth’ of such philosophical or metaphilosophical theses as prag-matic contextualism. See Chapter 5 for a more detailed Wittgensteinian twist to my overall argument.

24 On the concept of truthmaking in metaphysics, see Armstrong (2004); for a pragmatic critique, see Pihlström (2009: chapter 2).

25 Here, I cannot discuss the hotly debated question of whether we may take Wittgenstein to be arguing at all, or committing himself to any philosophi-cal theses, in the Philosophiphilosophi-cal Investigations or elsewhere. For a lucid criti-cal discussion, see Wallgren (2006). See also Chapter 5 below.

26 For an explicitly transcendental formulation of such argumentation, see Taylor (1979).

27 This is further defended in Pihlström (2003).

28 For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Pihlström (2010b).

29 See again Lowe (2006). Notably, however, most of the work on ontological dependence relations, including Lowe’s, has been strongly metaphysically realist and is therefore only of limited use to the kind of transcendental pragmatist I am here imagining as a potential advocate of the contextualiza-tion thesis.

30 At this point, I am indebted to David Carr’s analysis of the ‘paradox of subjectivity’—our need to understand ourselves as both subjects to whom the world is given and as natural objects in the world—developed in Carr (1999).

3. Pragmatism and Critical Philosophy

1 Compare this to Kant’s articulation of the idea of the ‘discipline of reason’ in the ‘Doctrine of Method’ (Methodenlehre) of the first Critique.

2 In her very interesting analysis of Jamesian pragmatism as a philosophy of eschatological hope, Angela Sager (2017) defends a kind of pragmatist and melioristic theodicism, thus taking a critical stance toward the kind of Jamesian approach I have tried to develop in my earlier work (Pihlström 2013a, 2014b) as well as in this book.

3 Notebook sheets from 1870, quoted in Perry (1964 [1948]: 120–121). Here James saw that fighting evil—holding that ‘though evil slay me, she can’t sub-due me, or make me worship her’ (ibid.: 121)—presupposes the freedom of the will, and was thus connected with the key problem of his spiritual crisis.

(Freedom, of course, is necessary, according to James, for any serious ethical philosophy. Perry notes that ‘moralism’ is just one name for what might be described as James’s ‘fundamental seriousness’; see ibid.: 388.)

4 In a strikingly non-Jamesian manner, Trakakis (2018) defends an antithe-odicism indebted to Bradley’s absolute idealism. While it is easy to agree with Trakakis (see also his introduction to Trakakis [ed.] 2018) that new approaches—including new metaphysical approaches and novel analyses of the divinity—are vitally needed in the stalemate that the philosophi-cal discussion concerning the problem of evil and suffering has reached, and even that Hegelian-cum-Bradleyan absolute idealism may be able to avoid crude anthropomorphisms often presupposed in theodicist concep-tions of God, it is less easy to maintain that the absolute idealist’s way of

getting rid of the problem of evil would be anything more than a theodicy by other means.

5 Note also that it is fully compatible with this Jamesian concern with the reality of, and truth about, evil to maintain that evil is real not as a substance of its own, let alone any ‘demonic’ greatness, but rather in its superficiality and banality, in a kind of emptiness that nevertheless tends to spread like a ‘fungus’. See Arendt (1994 [1963]) and Bernstein’s (2018: 66–67) analysis of the Arendtian refusal to ‘mythologize’ evil. For James as much as for Arendt, the reality of evil and suffering is non-mythological. On banality, see also Minnich (2017).

6 A critical question, to be explored later in this chapter, is whether this rejec-tion of metaphysical realism and its conceprejec-tion of objective truth maintains sufficient grounds for continuing to think in terms of an ordinary notion of truth needed for the kind of sincerity necessary for the antitheodicist project generally, or whether a slippery slope is opened from the Jamesian position toward a Rortyan one (see below).

7 Positive thinking is possible and meaningful (arguably only) against a mel-ancholic background, against the negativities that a ‘sick soul’ perceives in her/his world. Positive individual contributions, then, have their legitimate role to play, empirically speaking, provided that a pessimistic position is accepted transcendentally. Only the sick soul sees, profoundly enough, that everything is not all right, that the world is, for many of us (at least ‘the wounded’), in an important sense a wrong or even evil place, and that there-fore pragmatic, even positive, thinking and ‘difference-making’ is required.

Otherwise, no ‘positive’ approach can be serious enough. On James’s views on the ‘sick soul’, see James (1958 [1902]), as well as the discussion in Kivistö

& Pihlström (2016: chapter 6).

8 According to Quine’s famous holism, logical and mathematical beliefs (or sentences) are in principle on a par with empirical scientific beliefs (or sen-tences). See Quine (1980 [1953]: chapter 2).

9 For the realistic reading, also directed against Rorty’s own pragmatism, see, e.g., van Inwagen (1993: 69) and Mounce (1997: 211–218).

10 This is followed by the well-known Rortyan one-liner, ‘If we take care of freedom, truth can take care of itself’.

11 Kant (1983b [1791]). The essay was first published in Berlinische Monats-schrift, September 1791: 194–225. In referencing, even though I am citing the Cambridge English translation, the standard Akademie-Ausgabe num-bering will be used. For secondary literature focusing on the theodicy essay, see, e.g., Brachtendorff (2002) and Galbraith (2006). For a more detailed consideration, see Kivistö & Pihlström (2016: chapter 2); cf. also Dahl (2019: chapter 3).

12 For Bernstein’s insightful reading of Kant’s theory of radical evil, see Bern-stein (2002: chapter 1).

13 On insincerity and dishonesty in the philosophy of religion, with the prob-lem of evil as an example, see Trakakis (2017).

14 The Jamesian suggestion that a truthful relation to reality in general neces-sarily includes as its element a full recognition of individual experiences of suffering in their irreducibility can be compared to the way in which the Party of Nineteen Eighty-Four, despite the horrible light of the torture rooms and the gaze penetrating everywhere, leaves into the shade precisely such individual experiences. Light everywhere may actually disclose the truth of hidden suffering. A comparison to Hemingway’s short story, ‘A Clean and Well-Lighted Place’, suggests itself but must be left for another occasion. (See also Allen [1995] for related, highly relevant explorations of the relation between truth and truthfulness.)

15 This is argued in some detail in Kivistö & Pihlström (2016: chapter 5).

16 It might be suggested, for Levinasian reasons (and here I am again indebted to Panu-Matti Pöykkö), that it is misleading to speak about the moral ‘point of view’, because such a phrase seems to presuppose that one could either adopt or refuse or fail to adopt such a point of view. In contrast to such assumptions, one might argue that the moral standpoint, or the moral framework, or attitude, is inescapable—or, better, transcendentally present and constitutive of our lives (including our adoption of any points of view whatsoever). I am sticking to this phrase in the interest of brevity and easi-ness of expression, but I do acknowledge this Levinasian critical point.

17 Note that I am not claiming that James would be committed to any explic-itly Kantian antitheodicy. His antitheodicism, in my view, is Kantian in the broader sense of arguing that it is a necessary condition for the possibility of a moral point of view that evil and suffering are not explained away or justified. He rejects precisely the kind of rationalizing justification that Job’s

‘friends’ paradigmatically offer. My worry is whether this Kantian approach works in the overall context of Jamesian pragmatism, with its softened pragmatic notion of truth applied to the acknowledgment of the reality of suffering (as outlined above).

18 This criticism of Rorty (which is also, implicitly, a qualified criticism of Jamesian pragmatism, though not a proposal to give up that pragmatism but, rather, to carefully rethink its current value, being aware of its poten-tial problems) comes close to James Conant’s highly detailed—and devas-tating—attack on Rorty’s reading of Orwell. See Conant (2000) as well as Rorty (2000).