A Pragmatist Philosophy of History

Looking at current scholarship and opinion in American philosophy, one can easily conclude that there has been much more work done on studying the history of pragmatist philosophy than there has been on what pragmatist philosophy can give to the study of history. Ever since the resurrection of interest in pragmatism in the late twentieth century, we have seen a range of publications offering new interpretations for the ideas of the classical pragmatists, as well as important new applications for philosophical pragmatism and the moving to center stage of historically sidelined individuals and groups. What we have seen relatively little of, however, aside from a 2016 symposium in the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, is sustained engagement with the question of what a classically pragmatist approach to historical inquiry might contribute, entail, or imply. It is this important niche in the ecosystem of American philosophy that Marnie Binder's A Pragmatist Philosophy of History seeks to partially fill in.Binder, who is perhaps best known for her past writings on José Ortega y Gasset, is at pains from the start to indicate both the humility and the utility of her project. As befits the tradition, there are no grandiose philosophical pretensions here, with the "goal in presenting a pragmatist philosophy of history" merely being "to add another apparatus to the toolkits of the philosopher and the historian," an extra perspective that is "meant to complement other methodologies" (xi; emphasis in original), as she explains in her introduction. At the same time, pragmatism can offer something distinctive, firstly through asking the pragmatic question of what difference is meant by the accepting of particular presumed facts as being true, and secondly, being able to better understand why certain historical details have relevance, value, and meaning for us as a result of answering the first question. A pragmatist philosophy of history is helpful then, Binder maintains, as it "is in a unique position to bridge the speculative analytic divide" (xiii), and her approach to doing this is to draw upon the resources found in the works of a succession of the familiar classical pragmatists, building toward a synthesis and a cashing out of insights in her concluding reflections.Structurally the work consists of an explanatory introduction followed by six chapters, each dedicated to a particular pragmatist and their insights, leading finally to an extended concluding section drawing the component parts together and answering possible objections to the project. Pragmatism, as Binder recognizes, is seldom thought of as a historically orientated philosophy, but she argues that for each of these thinkers—William James, John Dewey, F. C. S. Schiller, Charles Sanders Peirce, George Herbert Mead, and Jane Addams—there is at least the germ of a philosophy of history that can be unearthed and developed, eventually helping to inform understanding of what is needed to bring a pragmatist ethics into practical reality, the last of which is manifested primarily by Addams. Thus, the treatment of William James in chapter 1 homes in on James's psychological insights into the way that experienced reality forms a temporal continuum; our consciousness necessarily selects from the experiences of the past, ascribing interpretations and assuming levels of facticity and relevance, since no individual can know all the facts or select among them with perfect impartiality. The continuum will be one that speaks to the inquirer's concerns with accuracy, practicality, meaningfulness, and coherence, as all knowledge comes about through temporal processes, and since past events are continuously added to and can be continuously reinterpreted, it can have no real or ultimate beginning or end. Accordingly, for a Jamesian pragmatist account, the "continuum of history is the way in which we construct a meaning for history of the connected past experiences with the present and in view of the future—this is what we call 'history'" (7; emphasis in original), and Binder draws upon José Medina's recent work to further illuminate how such history can and will be continuously critically reconstructed. In addition, she observes, such reconstruction can cast light on past interpretations of events and what these say both about the events discussed and, implicitly, about the priorities of the times in which such history was itself written. This emphasis on plurality, approximation, and incompleteness in historical understanding—"ever not quite" as James himself might say—sets matters up for a more collectively orientated perspective in chapter 2, that of John Dewey. Dewey's main role in the book, while following James in emphasizing selectivity and the necessarily value-laden and problem-directed character of historical inquiry, is not only to draw the individual historical sensibility onward into a collectivity, but also to invoke a different sort of collectivity in drawing the parallel between historical and scientific inquiry. Dewey's method proceeds toward scientific induction by collecting as much information as possible that is helpful for generating explanatory theories and concepts, while also aiming at a more inclusive range of data and perspectives. Deweyan instrumentalism sees and enables history not only to be reconstructed, but to be deployed toward improving human life, for such construction "adds to our own moral narratives as individuals; as a part of societies and cultural groups; as well as toward fellow individual human beings, other societies, and cultures" (37). A still closer synthesis between James's and Dewey's perspectives is promoted by chapter 3, where Binder turns to the rather more marginal (to us) figure of F. C. S. Schiller. Though there are intelligible reasons for the relative lack of attention given to Schiller by scholars of pragmatism—he was of German-British origins rather than being an American, he referred to his James-inflected perspective as "humanism" rather than pragmatism, and had an embarrassing enthusiasm for eugenics—Binder argues that he can add something to a pragmatist philosophy of history if his more extreme views are discarded. In essence, Schiller's primary part in the composite account being built is to establish the temporal priority between James's interpretation of experienced truth processes and Dewey's: for Schiller, the individual feeling (in the cognitive sense) has to be the starting point for understanding "before having a communal feeling and subsequently understanding" although "continual testing of the practical working of a truth and its eventual valuation is involved in both stages of the process" (43). As the processes of interpretation and inference by which the past is conceived of and by which it impacts the present and future unfold for the socially embedded historian, then, they must be guided by an ideal, and for Schiller, it is harmony that serves this purpose, whether for truth-making reality in the present, for understanding what the past can mean for us in the future, or for the ultimate social aim of creating a harmonious society of harmonious individuals. Schiller concedes that this goal may never be fully reached but, like the regulative ideal of objective truth, it can nonetheless be more closely approximated. This takes the movement of Binder's extended case back toward the alignment of historical with scientific research, which in turn leads into the work of Charles Sanders Peirce.Chapter 4, devoted to Peirce's contribution, brought some surprises to this reviewer in terms of Peirce's Christian commitments, though not about the truly important highlights of Peirce's thought for Binder's project. These are, firstly, Peirce's systematic account of the scientific method, running from abduction (the process of seeking an explanatory hypothesis) to deduction (tracing out probable experiential consequences if the hypothesis were to be correct) and thence to induction (looking through the facts), which, for reliability's sake, should ideally end in the provision of predictive capacity. Carrying out this sort of systematic historical study will itself require a community of scientific historians in order to "promote the evolutionary quality of historical inquiry and the greater reliability of the scientific method" (65) as well as to maximally sidestep mistaken preconceptions, and this expanded scientific community of credible historical inquirers is the second positive addition drawn from Peirce. Both are manifestations of Peirce's attempt to generate settled beliefs (in contrast to James especially), and they importantly establish distinctive standards of historical inquiry more rigorously than the earlier contributors, who primarily focused on processes. But a return to concern with processes follows in the treatment of George Herbert Mead's account of pragmatic communication and its ideals, in chapter 5. This is the shortest of the chapters but a necessary next step to deal with a component implicit in the development of a philosophy of history and its attendant community of inquiry, utilizing Mead's conception of a social self that arises through a historical process involving language. Finally, we arrive at Jane Addams in chapter 6, ascribing to her the accomplishment of bringing "the classical pragmatist tradition full circle with her emphasis on converting this all into social action founded upon a pragmatist ethics" (89). Binder approvingly outlines Addams's critiques of rugged individualism and exploitative, undemocratic labor conditions; her recognition of the individual's moral compass as a historically created and embedded phenomenon; and her critical acknowledgment of the ways in which the capitalist stress on commodity production, itself a historical product, warps both ethics and education. In particular, she notes the importance of narrative memory for Addams's accounts of motivating sympathetic knowledge, solidarity, and moral change, especially in a feminist context, and the fitting ways in which Addams brought pragmatist ethics into direct practice at Hull House and elsewhere in her campaigning life.In her reflective conclusion, Binder systematically engages with four core objections to her efforts—that pragmatism is too forward-focused, that its closeness to perspectivism may tend it toward relativistic corruption, that pragmatism is logically inconsistent, and that the pragmatic method may only be made operable by non-pragmatic means—and she manages to dismiss all quite convincingly, though here and throughout the book, she relies quite heavily on the requirement that pragmatism, especially as applied to studying history, "be better understood as a method rather than a theory" (114). The book does indeed do a good job of making the case for a pragmatist philosophy of history as implicit in and synthesizable from the protagonists selected, though at times, I thought it read more as an exposition of insights from different thinkers than a unified thesis; a bit more recapitulation of the argument as it proceeded, explaining who is contributing what and why it is unavailable from elsewhere, might have made the work still more effective. For example, I greatly enjoyed the Schiller chapter and the appreciation of the neglected figure that it represents, but still could not help wondering if it was strictly necessary, since arguably, much of what Schiller is supposed to be contributing here is already implicit in James. But this should not be allowed to detract from an original, important, and engaging scholarly volume that is wide-ranging, pleasingly written, and persuasive. Recommended.