Pragmatism and Political Pluralism - Consensus and Pluralism

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Abstract

A pragmatist thinker like Nicholas Rescher deems the idea that social harmony must be predicated in consensus to be both dangerous and misleading. An essential problem of our time is the creation of political and social institutions that enable people to live together in peaceful and productive ways, despite the presence of not eliminable disagreements about theoretical and practical issues. Such remarks, in turn, strictly recall the “practical” impossibility of settling philosophical disputes by having recourse to abstract and aprioristic principles. In the circumstances, the social model of team members cooperating for a common purpose is unrealistic. A more adequate model is, instead, that of a classical capitalism where - in a sufficiently well developed system - both competition and rivalry manage somehow to foster the benefit of the entire community (theory of the “hidden hand”). Certainly the scientific community is one of the best examples of this that we have, although even in this case we must be careful not to give too idealized a picture of scientific research. Consensus, however, in the Western tradition is an ideal worth being pursued. At this point we are faced with two basic positions. On the one side (a) “consensualists” maintain that disagreement should be averted no matter what, while, on the other, (b) “pluralists” accept disagreement because they take dissensus to be an inevitable feature of the imperfect world in which we live. A pluralistic vision, therefore, tries to make dissensus tolerable, and not to eliminate it. All theories of idealized consensus present us with serious setbacks. This is the case, for instance, with Charles S. Peirce. As is well known, Peirce takes truth to be “the limit of inquiry,” i.e. either what science will discover in the (idealized) long run, or what it would discover if the human efforts were so extended. By taking this path, thus, truth is nothing but the ultimate consensus reached within the scientific community. We can be sure that, once a “final” answer to a question has been found which is thereafter maintained without change, that one is the truth we were looking for. This fascinating theory, however, has various unfortunate consequences. In our day the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has in a way revived these Peircean insights, putting forward an influential theory to the effect that consensus indeed plays a key role in human praxis, so that the primary task of philosophy is to foster it by eliminating the disagreement which we constantly have to face in the course of our daily life. In his “communicative theory of consensus,” furthermore, he claims that human communication rests on an implicit commitment to a sort of “ideal speech situation” which is the normative foundation of agreement in linguistic matters. Consequently, the quest for consensus is a constitutive feature of our nature of (rational) human beings: rationality and consensus are tied together. A very strong consequence derives from Habermas’ premises: were we to abandon the search for consensus we would lose rationality, too, and this makes us understand that he views the pursuit of consensus as a regulative principle (rather than as a merely practical objective). Rescher opposes both Peirce’s eschatological view and Habermas’ regulative and idealized one.

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Pragmatism and Science

Michele Marsonet (2013)

Logical empiricism gave rise to a powerful paradigm and it took some decades to overthrow it, even though it should be judged respectfully since, after all, philosophy of science and logic as we know them stemmed from that ground. The basic assumptions on which the paradigm of the “received view” rested are essentially the following. In the first place, verificationism seemed almost a truth of faith. Secondly, logical empiricists never offered good arguments in support of their thesis that assertive discourse must be preferred to more pragmatic forms of language. Thirdly, they too easily assumed that something like “objective truth” really exists. Last but certainly not least, the logical empiricists did not fully recognize the historical dimension of the scientific enterprise, which subsequently turned to be something different from the “universal science” they were talking about. In the paper it is argued that scientific realism (and the nature of scientific knowledge at large) is a theme where the originality of pragmatist positions clearly emerge. Nicholas Rescher, for example, claims - against any form of instrumentalism and many postmodern authors as well - that natural science can indeed validate a plausible commitment to the actual existence of its theoretical entities. Scientific conceptions aim at what really exists in the world, but only hit it imperfectly and “well off the mark”. What we can get is, at most, a rough consonance between our scientific ideas and reality itself. This means that the scientific knowledge at our disposal in any particular moment of the history of mankind must be held to be “putative”, while its relations to the truth (i.e. how things really stand in the world) should be conceived in terms of tentative and provisional estimation. Even the optimistic visions that see science as growingly approaching the “real” truth have, at this point, to be rejected on pragmatic grounds.

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Pragmatic Objectivity

Michele Marsonet (2014)

Nicholas Rescher writes that “objectivity is not something we infer from the data; it is something we must presuppose. It is something that we postulate or presume from the very outset of our dealings with people’s claims about the world’s facts”. Such definition is just the opposite of objectivity conceived of in classical terms, but it cannot be equated with an idealistic viewpoint according to which objectivity is something that our mind simply creates in the process of reflection. It is, rather, a sort of cross-product of the encounter between our mind-shaped capacities, and a surrounding reality made up of things that are real in the usual meaning of the term. Science itself gives us some crucial insights in this direction, since it shows that we see, say, tables and trees in a certain way which, however, does not match the image that scientific instruments are able to attain. Does this mean that our commonsense view of the world is totally wrong and that nature deceives us? This is not the case. The difference between the commonsense and the scientific image of the world is explainable by the fact that we are evolutionary creatures. Nature has simply endowed human beings with tools and capacities that enable them to survive in an environment which - at least in remote eras - was largely hostile. Our way of seeing tables and trees is what is requested for carrying on a successful fight for the survival of the species: nothing more - and nothing less - is needed for achieving this fundamental goal. Turning once again to the problem of ontological objectivity, the picture has now gained both strength and clarity. If we recall that human endeavors, although occurring in a largely autonomous social and linguistic world, are nevertheless limited by the constraints that natural reality forces upon us, we begin to understand that the social-linguistic world itself is not a boat freely floating without directions. If the boat is there, it means that an explanation of its presence is likely to be obtained if only we are patient enough to look for it. Some kind of hand must be on the wheel, giving the boat indications on Contrary to other pragmatist-flavored positions popular nowadays, this approach maintains that universality has a fundamental and unavoidable function in our rational endeavors. This is due to the fact that “presupposition” and “hypothetical reasoning” are key ingredients of our very capacity to rationalize the world in which we live. Indeed, there can be no rationality without universality.