LETTERS
To the editors:
Professor John Patrick Diggins argu es
that " pragmati sm fail ed its own tes t of
praxis," decaying into opportunism
and expedi ency
(Partisan R eview,
Spring 1999) . Because pragmati sm
accepts " no ideals beyond experi–
ence," only " th e empirical data of
sc ience and society' s conventions"
count. " Seeing all life as contingent
and truth as relative to circumstance,
morali ty
[sic]
would be determin ed by
th e practi cal and the fun cti o nal."
Diggins offers hi s opinion as hi s–
tori cally based, but " th e foundin g
genius o f the school ," C harl es Sanders
Peirce, would rej ect th ese statements. A
reali st, Peirce believed in ideals and
norms, and val ued inquiry so far as it
transcended personal experi ence. To
him, truth was not relative to circum–
stance, but was a function of individuals
submitting their contentions to scien–
tific method and peer review.
William James is more suscep–
tible to Di ggins's charges, but he, too,
wo uld recoil from th ese characteriza–
tions. James never assigned validi ty to
empirical data and social conventi on
alone, but believed that the empirical
world was a portion of th e cosmos.
Although in
Pragmatism
he spoke of
expedi ence, elsewhere he affirmed
more metaphysical aspects of belief
and obj ec ti ve grounds for truth .
Though James's foll owers embraced
the truth-as-expedi ence formula, it is
incorrect to equ ate th e mi sapplication
of a philosophy with failure.
This collapsing o f old and new
pragmati sm is the basic error of the
essay. Diggins says Richard Rorty's
Philosophy and the Mirror
cif
Nature
" brilliantly demonstrated that truth
could no longer be based on coher–
ence to a scheme or correspondence
to the real." However, Rorty men–
tion ed James only seven times, in
passing, and gave D ewey only slightly
more attentio n. Instead, he revived
pragmatism in a vulgar form , and
casually cited James and Dewey as
hi storical backing.
This is not to di scount Diggins's
judgment, but to note a di stincti on.
Pragmati sm did not fail its own tes t of
praxis: it was mi sconstrued and mi s–
applied. If we wi sh to understand
pragmati sm, let's stick to the texts and
contexts of Peirce, James, and D ewey.
If later enthusias ts di storted pragma–
ti sm into alibi s for opportunism , let's
examin e th eir di stortions. There is no
reason to accuse pragmati sm o f vali–
dating femal e infanti cide, affirmin g
Vince Lombardi as a rol e model ,
ignoring fasc ism and racism , and
verging o n porn ography.
Mark Ballerlein
Emory University
John Patri ck Diggins is right when he
sugges ts th at pragmati sm is a philoso–
phy for adults only. But democracy is
also something we have never entrust–
ed to the young. First, a child is taught
that ideas have consequ ences; it is
given a metaphysical framework and a
horizon of significance (as C harl es
Taylor might have it). Then, as society
enfranchi ses th e child, we endow it
with the wi sdom that comes along
with recognizing that each person
makes only a small contribution to the
general will , that the only way to
choose among different concepti ons
of the good life is to put the ques tion
