The book first provides an overview of the transition, in the second half of the last century, from analytic to post-analytic philosophy, explaining to the reader how and why this situation came about. It also thematizes the rediscovery, within Anglo-American philosophical circles, of pragmatism — a current that had been overshadowed for decades by the logical neopositivism of Viennese origin and by analytic philosophy itself. The book then examines the relationships among authors such as Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Nicholas Rescher, showing that, although all can be classified as neopragmatists, they hold very different positions — much as was the case in the traditional pragmatism of Peirce, James, Dewey, and C.I. Lewis.
These introductory explanations serve as a foundation for the author to approach classic themes such as "truth," and more recent ones such as "conceptual scheme," in a new way. The conclusions reached are then used to analyze topics more directly connected to the philosophy of science. Since the statements of current scientific theories cannot be regarded as definitive truths about reality, the author emphasizes the need to be wary of a certain rhetoric of science that remains popular in epistemological circles. One cannot claim that science is the measure of all things, given that it is a form of knowledge always open to revision.
Since many scientists continue to use the notion of conceptual scheme, the author argues that it is indeed indispensable in the scientific domain, provided it is stripped of the aprioristic presuppositions that many philosophers attribute to it. He further observes that the relationship between perception and concepts, and between the physical environment and the conceiving subject, is considerably stronger than what is commonly assumed today. Our conceptualization of reality is essentially grounded in the type of physical environment we inhabit, which means that a different environment could give rise to a different conceptualization. Hence the conclusion that truly alternative conceptual schemes can only emerge in a world with markedly different physical characteristics.
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE
This philosophical work was originally published in Italian. To celebrate the launch of the publisher's new website, we are exceptionally publishing its Preface in English. Thank you to all our readers.
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Michele Marsonet received his degrees in Philosophy at the University of Genoa and in Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh (USA).
– Previously Coordinator of the PhD program, Chairman of the Philosophy Department and Dean of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, University of Genoa.
– Currently Vice-Rector for International Relations and Dean of the School of Humanities, University of Genoa.
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One of the foundational assumptions of pragmatism is that all human beings, as such, share certain features of reality and, consequently, have access to a common set of perceptions and representations. This shared set, in turn, generates intersubjective beliefs that form a "reasonably" objective basis for acting in the world. It is evident that the term "objectivity" assumes, in this context, a meaning that diverges from its traditional sense. The objectivity in question is, on the whole, a weak one, irreducible to the notion of faithful representation — or "mirroring" — of a reality independent of the knowing subject.¹ Nevertheless, pragmatists maintain that this weak objectivity is the only kind available to us, which means it must serve as the starting point for human inquiry into the world.² It follows, ultimately, that we can certainly speak of scientific theories as "better" than others, though this designation must not be understood in absolute terms. A theory is better when it enables us to organize more adequately — in the practical sense of the term — the sensory perceptions we all share as human beings, thereby giving rise to beliefs that, however fallible, are stable and resistant to revision.
The influence of these theses is discernible in the writings of Donald Davidson, who never explicitly identified himself as a pragmatist.³ He repeatedly proposed recourse to what he termed the "principle of correspondence," which leads an interpreter to presume that a speaker responds to the same features of the world to which the interpreter would respond under analogous circumstances.⁴ This principle is, in essence, not substantially different from the one consistently invoked by theorists of simulation. Their starting premise is that in everyday life, when we seek to understand the actions and behaviors of our fellow human beings, we engage in a kind of "practical simulation" that takes on the character of a game — albeit a highly serious one. Simulation closely resembles the capacity, possessed above all by actors, to inhabit another person's perspective while setting aside one's own individual characteristics. Yet it is not merely a matter of deciding what we ourselves would do in given circumstances. One must also attempt to understand what one would do if placed in the position of the individual whose behavior one seeks to predict: personal preferences, idiosyncrasies, and expectations must therefore recede — as far as possible — into the background.
Within the Davidsonian framework, it is only by drawing on a principle of correspondence of the kind described above that we are able to assign content to the linguistic expressions of the subject under interpretation. Certain problems arise, however, the first of which derives from the holistic character that Davidson, following Quine, attributes to meaning. If it is correct to assert that meaning emerges only within a context, then it is evident that we cannot assign content to a sentence without first assigning content to a range of other sentences. It would seem to follow from this observation that radical translation is itself impossible, given that the data upon which our theory of truth is constructed derive from the examination of individual sentences. In other words, we could not develop a theory of truth at all without first attributing initial content to sentences taken in isolation. Yet we are not in a position to assign such initial content prior to possessing a theory of truth — a consequence, it should be recalled, of the holistic characterization of meaning that Davidson emphasizes.
Davidson's response rests on an appeal to what he regards as our shared knowledge concerning the fundamental character of human interests and responses to the surrounding environment. By drawing precisely on our capacity to simulate the behavior of others, we can determine which features of reality are referred to by the sentences of the subject under interpretation. Given what we know about the fundamental characteristics of human beings, we can formulate reasonable hypotheses regarding what a subject intends to convey by uttering certain sentences. Since these are hypotheses, we invariably run the risk of error; yet it is equally evident that errors can only be detected by attempting the simulation game described above.
The principle of correspondence thus presupposes a certain level of agreement — not only regarding what interpreter and subject "see," but also concerning how and why they respond to their environment in one way rather than another. It is precisely this agreement that renders linguistic interpretation possible. The idea of treating human beings as if they shared a common world is a necessary condition of interpretation, and it likewise enables us to understand the phenomenon of meaning. Admittedly, matters become more complex when interpreting highly sophisticated linguistic expressions such as metaphors and the theoretical statements of science; however, given that meaning is assumed to be verifiable, these difficulties are bound to diminish as our capacities for comprehension develop and are refined.
The foregoing considerations demonstrate that the influence of pragmatism on contemporary analytic and post-analytic philosophy frequently assumes a mediated character, one that only an attentive interpreter familiar with the theses of Peirce, James, and Dewey is capable of discerning. It should further be noted that a substantial portion of pragmatist ideas prove compatible with the foundational commitments of the analytic tradition. The work of authors such as Quine and Rescher, for instance, demonstrates that analytic philosophy can safeguard its intellectual and methodological heritage by engaging with traditions of thought that converge with it on certain fundamental themes. From the 1960s onward, Rescher developed insights contained in Quinean articles that had appeared in the preceding decade. Putnam, Rorty, and — to a certain extent — Davidson subsequently followed the same path.
One of the principal reasons that leads many analytic philosophers to regard pragmatism with suspicion is the pragmatist underestimation of formal logic. This reservation does not, of course, apply to Charles S. Peirce, whose contributions to logic as we know it today are undeniable⁵; however, Peirce belongs to the previous century, and the polemical objections are typically directed at a more recent thinker such as John Dewey. It must be acknowledged that a contemporary logician may find many of the theses contained in Dewey's foundational work Logic: The Theory of Inquiry rather puzzling.⁶ That work, in fact, offers a critique of certain fundamental presuppositions of symbolic logic as it has developed since the mid-twentieth century — presuppositions that receive explicit and precise formulation in the manifesto of the Vienna Circle.⁷ Since, according to the logical positivists, the meaning of every scientific statement must be specifiable through reduction to statements concerning empirical data, the meaning of scientific concepts must likewise be reducible, ultimately, to concepts of the most elementary order possible — that is, to those correlated with fundamental empirical data. In such a reductionist approach, logical analysis plays a fundamental role, being bound up with the scientific worldview advanced by the logical positivists.⁸
Dewey's Logic anticipates many of the objections that post-empiricist thinkers subsequently leveled at this conception. When viewed from a historical perspective, it becomes — as Richard Rorty and other post-analytic authors have argued — one style of reasoning among many, whose philosophical roots can be traced back to the theses of Ernst Mach and to the logical atomism of Bertrand Russell and the early Wittgenstein. But this means that logic, too, lives within history. No particular formulation of it can be regarded as settled once and for all, nor can it be imposed as a paradigm to be accepted without question. In contrast to the logical positivists and logical empiricists, Dewey draws no rigid boundary between subject and object. For him, such a boundary is nothing more than a functional distinction adopted in everyday life for practical purposes; it should not, however, obscure a far more important fact — namely, that human knowledge arises within a unitary process in which stimuli and responses always refer to concrete situations.⁹ In this connection, it is worth noting the convergence with findings emerging from the study of quantum mechanics. Werner Heisenberg, for instance, affirmed that "natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it describes nature in relation to the systems we use to question it. This is something Descartes could not have anticipated, but it renders impossible a sharp separation between the world and the self."¹⁰
Knowledge therefore possesses, from a Deweyan standpoint, an essentially transactional character, where "transaction" denotes a process that does not involve factors rigidly determined from the outset, but rather elements whose characteristics are established in the very course of the process itself. There are, in short, no immutable substances in nature.
Standard logic is, in fact, founded upon certain strong ontological assumptions: (A) that there exists a domain of clearly identifiable objects, and (B) that stable relations obtain among them. Let us then consider whether the terms (a) "existence" and (b) "reality" can be identified with one another, or whether they must instead be held distinct. If we begin from the presupposition that such a distinction is legitimate, we may say that (a) is identified with "appearance," while (b) is reality as such. This is the strategy pursued by idealists such as Bradley. If, on the other hand, we follow the Kantian path, (a) corresponds to "experienceable objects" (phenomena), while (b) is identified with "things-in-themselves" (noumena).
One might object that a distinction of this kind leads to the conclusion that we can say nothing meaningful about the world in itself, understood as a reality independent of the inquiries we conduct into it. There would be, in other words, a natural world that exists independently of whether or not we enter into contact with it. Yet this world is also an environment only insofar as it stands in relation — directly or indirectly — to the vital functions of the organism. In any case, the pragmatist tradition maintains, very little can be said about things before they enter the sphere of our inquiry. The error consists in conceiving of situations as belonging to the world independently of the effects our investigation has upon them. To assert that little can be said about the nature of things before they enter the sphere of our inquiry is to presuppose a distinction — one that appears intuitively well-founded — between (1) things experienced and (2) things independent of our experience.
It is therefore worth noting that one who asserts we cannot say much about (2) is by no means compelled to deny the existence of a world independent of experience. It is perfectly legitimate, for example, to maintain that there was a time when no knowing subjects existed to experience the world — and this is, after all, precisely what natural history teaches us. In Kantian terms, one might also say that there is a world independent of our sensory activity and of the particular modes in which it is exercised. Here, however, caution is required, for the point is a delicate one. When we speak of organisms and environments, and of the interactions between the latter and organisms, we always refer to certain features of reality situated beyond the contents and outcomes of the inquiries undertaken by knowing subjects.
Nevertheless, it is equally clear that we must delineate some conceptual framework within which the formulation of a theory of inquiry becomes possible. In other words, the period in which knowing subjects did not exist can only be imagined and reconstructed on the basis of a framework in which knowing subjects are present. It is our inquiry that enables us to do this, and it is recourse to the dimension of "possibility" that furnishes the key for proceeding along this path. The time in which knowing subjects did not exist can be imagined and reconstructed only by reference to a time in which such subjects are present. That time is, in any case, seen through the eyes of the mind, and it is the conceptual scheme we now possess that permits us to formulate hypotheses and judgments about it.
All of this has, despite appearances to the contrary, important consequences for the conception of logic. Put otherwise: does experience play a role in the formulation of logical laws or not? This contrast divides those who maintain that the experiential factor cannot in any case be set aside from those — belonging to a portion of the analytic tradition — who argue instead that experience lies beyond the proper concerns of logic.
One may agree that our experience of the world is such that it consists of objects that have properties and stand in relations to one another. However, the manner in which reality presents itself to the subject depends, in turn, on the operative perspective the subject occupies in the world. With this in mind, one might also contend that objects, properties, and relations — which play a primary role in logic, particularly at the semantic level, in interpreting a language and establishing truth conditions for sentences — ought to be treated as elements of our experience. This means that they are simultaneously products and instruments of cognitive activity, and should not be regarded as independent of — and prior to — inquiry itself. Hence, the construction of a conceptual framework necessarily precedes the development of any semantic theory. The critical point is to establish where the construction of the framework ends and logic proper begins.
Taking Bertrand Russell as an example, he argues that we must be in a position to make certain basic assumptions about the world independently of our experience of it. For Russell, the world is divided into objects that have properties and stand in mutual relations: we need only "open our eyes" to take note of such facts. These facts, in turn, are not products of experience, since it is rather our experience that is anchored to facts. A proposition is true if it expresses a fact, and false otherwise. It follows that logic is the study of the formal aspects of linguistic systems, with attention directed in particular to the syntactic dimensions of those systems — and it is within this context that logic conducts its investigations.
To adopt Russell's view is to embrace what Dewey termed the "spectator theory of knowledge" — an expression that Rorty, Putnam, and other post-analytic (or, if one prefers, neo-pragmatist) thinkers have once again rendered current in recent decades.¹¹ According to this view, we can say how the world really is independently of our participation in it. The assumption is thus that there is a world "full of facts," without our asking how we come into contact with them in our experience. Russell presupposes that we are able to enter into immediate contact with things by "paying attention to them," as though this were sufficient to yield basic and irrefutable knowledge of facts themselves. Dewey and others have replied that this amounts to ignoring the interactive character of our attending to things.
Classical Newtonian physics, for example — and in its wake many other scientific disciplines — takes for granted a sharp separation between observer on one side and observed object on the other. Contemporary science, and quantum mechanics in particular, calls precisely this presupposition into question. Even from science itself, then, before philosophy ever intervenes, comes the refutation of this seemingly simple, because intuitively appealing, picture.
We do not lose direct contact with reality by acknowledging that facts, as such, are relative to — or internal to — some conceptual scheme. Consider an analogy. While driving our automobile, we notice that a car alongside ours is moving at a constant speed relative to our own vehicle. This is a simple and real fact, even though we are unable to say at what speed that car is traveling relative to an absolute point of reference. That the other car's speed is constant relative to ours does not cease to be a "fact" because we adopt our own position as the point of reference. We literally cannot do otherwise: no absolute points of reference are available to us. Conceptual schemes, in this regard, are operative perspectives on the world, and are therefore analogous to the kind of relative frames of reference we have just illustrated.
Insofar as a proposition contains at least an implicit reference to the operative perspective employed in formulating it, there is no way of obtaining, so to speak, a "more factual" fact than this. We cannot describe reality more concretely than this, even if we can describe it with increasing accuracy. There is no reason to suppose that we fail to describe things "as they really are" simply because we speak of them from within the perspective of a given conceptual scheme, since there is no other way to do so now, nor has there ever been. It is our relationship with the world — which is an organism/environment interrelation — that dictates these limits. We cannot transcend the perspective through which we are in contact with the world; and even to say "we enter into contact with the world" is hazardous, since it suggests there is a "before" (when we were not in contact) and an "after" (when we are). In other terms, we cannot "detach" ourselves from reality in order to view it from an external vantage point.
Let us note, then, that Evandro Agazzi has on several occasions emphasized that contemporary formal logic has developed as a logic "of" mathematics.¹² Yet the relations between logic and philosophy in general, and between logic and the various sub-domains of philosophical knowledge (metaphysics, ontology, ethics, epistemology, and so forth) cannot be neglected, given that they have always been very close since antiquity. It cannot therefore be overlooked that formal logic found its ideal cultural milieu in logical positivism and in the broader analytic tradition during the course of the twentieth century. It was precisely in that environment that it grew to the point of achieving the status of an autonomous discipline — so much so as to raise the suspicion that its ancient ties to philosophy have by now become irreparably loosened. Needless to say, this discussion concerns those logicians who are interested in the philosophical foundations of their discipline, since no one disputes that a logician's interests may be directed toward purely formal dimensions.
The reasons that account for this situation are essentially traceable to the foundational assumptions underpinning logical positivism. Regarding the science of their day — as the positivists of the previous century had done — as an indispensable point of reference, the logical positivists insisted that philosophy too must aim to attain standards of scientificity and precision, an objective to be pursued by creating artificial languages capable of eliminating the ambiguities present in ordinary language. At the origins of logical positivism, this objective was bound up with the program of refounding all knowledge on a purely empirical basis — a program realizable through the construction of a unified scientific language and one whose corollary was the reduction of every scientific discipline to the model of physics.¹³
Following this path, then, everything that can be said clearly must be expressible in the discourse of formal logic. Moreover, the techniques of this discipline make it possible to realize in philosophy a "principle of economy," aimed at reducing ontological and epistemological commitments to the indispensable minimum, while simultaneously eliminating the possibility of error and the constant presence of ambiguity and confusion in ordinary language. Against this abstract and foundationalist conception of logic, the pragmatist current — primarily through thinkers such as Dewey and C.I. Lewis — opposed a different vision, treating logic as an instrument for inquiry rather than an end to be pursued in itself. In numerous works, Dewey criticized the following characterization of logic contained in the Vienna Circle's manifesto:
Since the meaning of every scientific statement must be specifiable by reduction to statements about the given, the meaning of every concept, whatever the branch of science to which it belongs, must likewise be specifiable through gradual reduction to other concepts, down to concepts of the lowest level, which concern the given itself. If such an analysis were carried out for all concepts, they would ultimately appear ordered within a reductive system, or "system of constitution." The investigations directed toward this goal — that is, constitution theory — thus form the framework within which logical analysis is applied according to the scientific worldview (...) It is with modern symbolic logic (logistics) that one succeeds for the first time in achieving the requisite rigor in definitions and statements, as well as in formalizing the inferential process of common thought, translating it into a form automatically controlled through the mechanism of symbols.¹⁴
As noted above, Dewey anticipated the critiques that the representatives of the post-empiricist turn would subsequently direct at this conception.¹⁵ Dewey's polemical targets are atomism — both logical and psychological — and Kantian dualism. The American philosopher denounces the abstractness and the failure to correspond with reality entailed by the fragmentary character of human experience that constitutes the negative legacy of traditional empiricism — a legacy that, he maintains, ultimately reinforces Kant's classical dualism. There is no doubt in his view that a close interrelation exists between the development of contemporary formal logic and the presupposition of "atoms of experience," or elementary data, which must in turn be translated into "atomic propositions." Another and parallel tendency of contemporary logic — again according to Dewey — is to generate formal systems so remote from the domains of knowledge they might serve as to give the frequent impression of a more or less gratuitous technical construction.
In any case, logic so conceived concerns, in his view, the systematization of what is already known more than the discovery of what is new; or at least it lacks that importance for the knowledge of the new — and therefore for genuine inquiry — that is Dewey's primary concern. It follows that logical calculi understood in this sense are, according to Dewey, of limited value — and, in particular, they prove inadequate when one attempts to subject human affairs to scientific treatment.
For Dewey, the logical dimension constitutes an organic expression of the practical dimension, in the sense that logic on the one hand and practice on the other cannot be artificially severed from each other: the only valid logic is one that functions practically. He seeks to avoid the difficulties that arise when one attempts to bring together an empirical "matter" and a rational "form" that have been severed from the outset, and he accordingly aims to eliminate the immediate, the pure fact, and the merely sensory from the domain of inquiry. His "model of inquiry" is situated within a framework of biological and social evolution: it constitutes nothing other than an articulation rendered possible by the capacities of language and by the vital transactions that necessarily exist between every biological individual and the environment in which it lives.
Yet, as noted above, it is equally clear that, in order to accomplish this, we must nonetheless delineate some conceptual framework within which the formulation of a theory of inquiry becomes possible. The dispute that in the late 1930s pitted Bertrand Russell against John Dewey unfolded precisely along the lines we have traced above: on one side, Russell's presupposition of the possibility of making certain assumptions about the world independently of our experience of it; on the other, Dewey's thesis of the interactive and transactional nature of our "attending to things."¹⁶
George H. Mead, Dewey's colleague and Hilary Putnam's teacher,¹⁷ summarized the pragmatist position on formal logic in a manner as concise as it is effective. He begins from the observation that "within the domain of science it is utterly impossible to distinguish within an object the fact from what may be an idea (...) There is a strong temptation to locate these supposed structures of facts in a world of conceptual objects — molecules, atoms, electrons, and the like — because these objects are by definition at least beyond the perceptual universe. They seem to belong to a realm of things in themselves (...) if we study their structure within the universe of scientific constructs, we notice that their infrasensible character is due solely to the nature of our sensory processes, not to a different metaphysical essence."¹⁸
Mead goes on to observe that, since our scientific analyses depend on the form that our objects assume, there is no general analytical procedure to which science has adhered from its origins to the present day. The Russellian ambition to arrive at so-called "atomic facts" that are not further decomposable thereby becomes illusory: "It is possible to operate with more or less atomic sensory data, arranging them so as to satisfy the apparent variables of propositions, and to arrive at formally correct conclusions (...) The problem is that no scientist has ever decomposed his object into such sensory data, which exist only in books of philosophy."¹⁹ His conclusion is that "the complete abstraction from content has relegated the conditions of universally valid thought so far from the concrete problems of science that symbolic logic has never been used as a method of inquiry. It has in effect highlighted the fact that thought addresses problems concerning uses to which it can be applied, not a metaphysical world beyond experience. Symbolic logic deals with the universe of discourse, not with the world of things."²⁰
This, then, is the context within which Dewey's conception of logic is situated, and which distinguishes it from the conception that became standard in the twentieth century. According to the American philosopher, the use of symbolization does not automatically guarantee the validity of logical reasoning processes. He maintains instead that there is a close connection between the development of contemporary formal logic and the supposed presence of "atoms of experience," or elementary data, which must in turn be translated into atomic propositions. On the other hand, it is clear that for Dewey — and for the pragmatist tradition as a whole, both old and new — the scientific worldview need not necessarily be a positivist one. Pragmatism, in all its various currents and sub-currents, has consistently rejected every dichotomy between statements of fact and value judgments, whereas logical positivists and logical empiricists relegated the latter to the inner sphere of emotions and feelings.²¹ But this rejection is quite different from that of positivism, which adopts a reductionist attitude in this regard.
From the pragmatist standpoint, the logical dimension is an integral part of the practical dimension, given that logic and practice cannot be separated by rigid artificial barriers. In this sense, there are affinities between the pragmatist conception of logic (and of language) and the theses of the later Wittgenstein.²² Dewey's critical attitude toward formal logic is therefore to be sought in the fact that, in his view, this type of logic is incapable of capturing the enormous complexity of the real world. From his perspective, logic is significant only within the broader context of the methodology of inquiry, within which it plays a valuable but instrumental role.
Finally, for the sake of completeness, it should be noted that a recently published volume²³ has advanced the thesis that Dewey's logical conceptions would probably have achieved greater success had they not been sharply criticized by Bertrand Russell in the 1930s — when the British philosopher was, as is well known, at the height of his fame. The history of the Dewey-Russell controversy over the nature and purpose of logic is fairly well known, and we do not intend to dwell upon it at length here.²⁴ We wish only to reiterate what was said earlier — namely, that formal logic developed as a logic of mathematics, and that this fact led many to conclude that mathematical reasoning should be adopted as the paradigm to which all other forms of reasoning must be referred. This explains, for example, why it is often difficult to make students understand the reasons that lead mathematical logicians to adopt material implication — with its rather unconvincing truth table — as the standard form of implication (the reason being precisely that such logic holds mathematical reasoning to have priority over all others). Dewey — and pragmatists in general — do not accept this view uncritically, a circumstance that leads the author of the aforementioned volume to offer the following reflections:
It is not insignificant that Frege, the founding father of twentieth-century logic, was a mathematician. His interest in logic was primarily motivated by an interest in analyzing fundamental mathematical concepts. In much the same way that Newton devised a formal calculus from scratch in order to be able to properly talk about certain aspects of the physical world, Frege designed his own "formula language" just to be able to properly talk about mathematical concepts (...) it is important to keep in mind Frege's original motivations as a mathematician when one reads his material bearing more directly on natural-language semantics.²⁵
It is, in our view, of considerable importance to bear in mind that, however strange his logic may appear today, Dewey's concerns were broader in scope than those of Frege. After all, why should we uncritically accept the thesis that philosophy must conform to the standards of mathematical rigor?²⁶ Given the growing influence of the naturalistic turn, the epistemology of complexity, and neo-pragmatism itself, the "exact philosophy" still envisioned in certain philosophical circles appears more as a myth than as a concretely pursuable project. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find the following observation: "Many of the ideas that Dewey developed in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry are surprisingly relevant to current developments in logic and the cognitive sciences. Though published in the early part of the twentieth century, the ideas which Dewey explored are only now starting to be sufficiently appreciated."²⁷
1 Vedi
il successivo capitolo 7, §7.1, per un approfondimento di questo punto.
2
Verificheremo in seguito che questo comune punto di partenza non impedisce
affatto il sorgere di disaccordi anche sostanziali in campo pragmatista. Un
autore come Rescher, ad esempio, traccia una netta linea di distinzione tra
pragmatismo soggettivo e pragmatismo oggettivo.
3 Com’è
noto, è stato Richard Rorty ad iscrivere d’ufficio Davidson nella grande
corrente del pragmatismo del nostro secolo. Di ciò parleremo ancora più avanti.
4 Si
veda D. Davidson (1991), p. 158.
5 Si
pensi, per fare un solo esempio, al lavoro pionieristico di Peirce sulle
logiche polivalenti.
6 J. Dewey (1974a).
7 H. Hahn, O. Neurath, R. Carnap (1979).
8 Si
veda J. Dewey (1973) per una critica articolata a questo tipo di approccio.
9
Verificheremo, nel prossimo capitolo, che anche sotto questo aspetto Davidson
risente dell’influenza pragmatista.
10 W.
Heisenberg (1966), p. 98. Si veda inoltre D. Bohm (1996).
11 Si
veda ad esempio C.B. Kulp (1992).
12 Vedi
E. Agazzi (1986) e (1990).
13 Vedi
Aa.Vv. (1973).
14 H. Hahn, R. Carnap, O. Neurath (1979), pp. 80-81.
15 Vedi
J. Dewey (1990), nonché G. Borradori (1991) per un panorama storico.
16 B. Russell, “Dewey’s New Logic”, in P.A. Schilpp, L.E. Hahn (1989), pp. 135-156. Nella stessa sede Dewey rispose alla
critiche di Russell con il saggio “Experience, Knowledge and Value: A
Rejoinder” (si vedano, in particolare, le pp. 544-549). Una visione un po’
caricaturale delle posizioni pragmatiste è contenuta in B. Russell (1967), vol.
IV, mentre un riassunto della polemica con Dewey (estesa anche a James) si
trova in B. Russell (1995), capitolo 15.
17
Putnam ha recentemente espresso il suo debito intellettuale nei confronti di
Mead in Putnam (1995b).
18 G.H. Mead (1996), pp. 91-92.
19 G.H. Mead (1996), p. 93.
20 G.H.
Mead (1996), p. 96.
21 La
migliore esposizione di questo punto di vista è quella contenuta nel classico
volume di A.J. Ayer (1987).
22 In
particolare L. Wittgenstein (1978). Si veda H. Putnam (1992), capitolo 2, per
un parallelo tra le tesi del secondo Wittgenstein e quelle del pragmatismo.
23 T.
Burke (1994).
24 Nella
precedente nota 16 sono indicati i principali testi contenenti la polemica tra
Russell e Dewey.
25 T.
Burke (1994), pp. 3-4. Per un punto di vista diverso si veda C. Penco (1994).
26 Si
noti, inoltre, che questi stessi canoni di rigore matematico sono stati
contestati da Imre Lakatos e da altri filosofi della matematica postempiristi.
Si veda ad esempio I. Lakatos (1979).
27 T. Burke (1994), p. x.
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