The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy

Abraham Kaplan once suggested that Dewey’s “magic number” was two. His observation seems to be supported by the titles Dewey gave to his books, such as Experience and Nature. But in making this observation, Kaplan hedged a bit. Perhaps it would be better, he added, to say that Dewey had two magic numbers: he seemed to look for twos in order to turn them into ones. Looking back over the notes I have pencilled in the margins of Dewey’s Collected Works over the years, I am struck with the number of times “1, 2, 3” appears. In some cases these passages are reminiscent of Peirce’s categories. In other cases, they recall Hegel’s dialectic. Dewey’s “magic numbers” are tools that can help us understand the structure and content of his work.

It has been argued that pragmatism as a philosophical movement lacks unity. However, contrasts and similarities are always relative to a level of generality on which they can be distinguished. And, although Peirce, James, and Dewey disagree on a number of important issues, they have quite a number of assumptions and theses in common. The most general and important of these theses is the belief that how our beliefs relate to reality depends on our actions, and that the semantical independence of our actions plays a crucial role in the development of our theoretical beliefs. Although there are other beliefs and assumptions common to the three classical pragmatists, even this property is enough to distinguish the classical pragmatists from one of their contemporary followers, Richard Rorty.

Pragmatism is a philosophy still in the making, one that has taken (and will take) novel twists and turns as the general spirit of its paradigmatic novelty moves forward. However, when creative appropriation of pragmatic themes begins to destroy this philosophic spirit and paradigmatic vision, such novelty is no longer a further development of pragmatism but, rather, a move to a different position, one that must be clearly distinguished from the pragmatic movement in American philosophy.

In general, philosophy does not progress as the sciences do. Philosophers seem largely to follow fashions. Of course there are fashions in the sciences, too, but in philosophy they appear to predominate. So, when I look back at the two-thirds or more of the century that I remember, I see a succession of such fashions replacing one another. At the same time, I see something resembling progress in a couple of fields that I was involved in. Finally, I find us, at the close of the twentieth century, still burdened with one long-dominant attitude that many thinkers, in different ways, have tried (in vain) to overcome—an attitude reflected recently, in fact, in a particularly vocal fashion. Let me follow briefly each of these three lines of reflection.

Philosophy in the twentieth century, by and large, has not been interested in comprehensive accounts. This development can be attributed in large part to the breaking of philosophy into schools and the rise of professionalism, both of which have led to the reduction of philosophy as a subject. The task of the philosopher cannot justifiably be so confined. He must attempt to understand all the pivotal realities, what they do, and how they are related. Philosophy is an exploration and adventure. I want to engage in it in order to understand reality, to pay attention to pivotal features, and to the ways in which they are interlocked. Philosophy is a discipline in a constant process of adventurous discovery.

Philosophy differs from most other disciplines in that one of the questions with which its practitioners are professionally concerned is its own nature. There is nothing surprising about this since, having no special subject-matter of its own, it is free—and perhaps obliged—to enquire into the special nature of every discipline. But, such an obligation presumes that we know what in general we are—or should be—up to in philosophy. What is, in fact, our objective? To establish how we should live, the nature of the good life? To determine the scope and limits of human knowledge? To achieve self-understanding? If properly understood, I think the last suggestion is correct. I do not mean that we should turn into psychologists or social scientists. Rather, I mean that our essential, if not our only, business is to get a clear view of our most general working concepts or types of concept and of their place in our lives. We should aim at general human conceptual self-understanding.

This paper surveys the relation between philosophy and science in the perspective of developments after 1900. Two main lines of thought are distinguished—one stemming from Russell, another from Wittgenstein. The Russellian view holds that science seeks knowledge of truth, while Wittgenstein emphasizes the philosophical understanding of meaning (significance). Knowledge and understanding are the two basic dimensions of the cognitive life of man. In the course of time knowledge has, nourished by scientific progress, hypertrophied at the expense of understanding. A “scientific” spirit has invaded philosophy and created a climate of opinion more akin to Russell’s than Wittgenstein’s view of things.