Reinventing Pragmatism: American
The Unravelling of Scientism: American
Complaints abound regarding the increasing degree of specialisation in contemporary philosophy. However, there are still a number of philosophers writing who have made their name by combining the writing of sweeping histories of the subject with a bringing together of disparate parts of that history in the advancement of one grand theory. Joseph Margolis stands, alongside Jurgen Habermas, Manfred Frank, Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor, as one of those few who adopt this latter approach. One might, therefore, think these two books under review a refreshing and welcome addition to current philosophical literature. Unfortunately these reviewers cannot, in this case, report so.
Those who most readily leave themselves open to the charge of being too specialised will often respond that it is their attention to detail which demands such specialisation. The implications of such a defence are that those in the ‘Margolis camp’ pay too little attention to said details. Unfortunately, we find this potential charge to be one that sticks all too readily, in the case of Margolis. These two books are comprised of essays which are (at best) best described as philosophical history at a distance. The purpose of these histories is to prepare the ground in such a way that Margolis can then advance his own prosaic (though obfuscatory owing to employment of misleading terminology) philosophical remarks in a manner that gives the unsuspecting reader the impression that said remarks are subject-transforming. They are not.
Of course these are serious charges, and if we are to make them stick then we will have to give some details as to why and how Margolis is guilty. However, before we turn to detailing our charge we would first like to comment on what we feel is a worrying trend.
These two
volumes run to fewer than one hundred and eighty pages each. They comprise
essays by Margolis that have appeared elsewhere. The essays share enough in
common to be (explicitly) contributions to the adumbration of one theme: American
So, to the review. There are many issues we could raise by way of demonstrating the flaws we find in Margolis’s work. We shall focus here, owing to limitations of space, on his exposition and criticism of John McDowell’s work. However, to indicate that the problem lies not only with his treatment of McDowell we shall begin with a couple of Margolis’s other remarks which will give you a taste of the material.
For instance, one finds Dummett’s philosophy referred to as “a kind of Fregean Kantianism – Cartesianism, in effect” (P 47). What service the running together of Frege, Kant and Descartes might serve, historically, heuristically or even merely descriptively is difficult to ascertain, particularly when prefixed with ‘kind of’ and followed by ‘in effect’. It tells us little or nothing about Michael Dummett’s work, though much about the indiscriminate mud-slinging Margolis engages in.
Margolis might
well respond by pointing to his own take on what it is to be Cartesian. However,
this is similarly unhelpful. His take on Cartesianism, he tells us, is not
textually bound to Descartes but rather alludes to Cartesianism’s
“characteristic sense of an objective knowledge of reality” (P 38) – whatever that means. So in turn that only leads us to more similarly
confusing assertions: because we find both recent (Wittgensteinian) Hilary
Putnam and John McDowell accused of being Cartesian. Really? Putnam of Threefold
Cord and “Aristotle after Wittgenstein” a Cartesian? John McDowell of Mind and World and “One strand in the
private language argument” and “Putnam on Mind and Meaning” a Cartesian? Yes, apparently
so -- but in Margolis’s textually-liberated use of ‘Cartesianism’ of course. (Why
not merely call them all ‘epistemological realists’?) We reached the stage where we half- expected
to turn the page to find a section titled something madder still, such as ‘Gilbert
Ryle: the ultimate closet Cartesian’. Or ‘Wittgenstein’s
In addition, consider remarks which when put together are just plain confusing such as (for example): “Peirce was undoubtedly a greater figure [than John Dewey] … But Peirce was all but unknown” (S x) and “Pragmatism’s history is at the very least improbable. It begins with the immense influence of C.S. Peirce” (P 1). Granted someone can remain little known while exercising influence, but can they be ‘all but unknown’ while having ‘immense influence’? If his influence was indeed ‘immense’ then it was so because he influenced an ‘immense’ number of people and/or his influence proved to be ‘immense’ (say, changing the course of intellectual history). Either way it beggars belief that Peirce remained all but unknown while having immense influence. His work clearly wasn’t all but unknown. Margolis on Peirce is, then, merely confusing.
We now turn to an examination of Margolis’s remarks on John McDowell, with particular reference to his deeply-perplexing predication of the ‘Cartesian McDowell’. Margolis’s discussion of McDowell takes place in the context of a discussion of ‘intermediaries’ between mind and world. This in turn takes place in a wider discussion of a debate which took place between Putnam and Rorty, beginning around the time when Putnam referred to himself as an ‘internal realist’. McDowell enters the story as someone who is on the right track in that he does not wholly dispense with ‘intermediaries’ (contra Rorty and Davidson who, we are told, deny them) but retains them in the adverbial and not relational sense (contra Putnam who as internal realist talked of relational intermediaries). However, McDowell ultimately fails. He fails because (we are told) he invokes ‘intermediaries’ between mind and world but they are ‘naturalistic’ (in the biological sense) and not culturally and historically bound intermediaries. McDowell is ‘Cartesian’ (in the Margolis sense) then because his (alleged) biological naturalism leads him to imply access to an objective knowledge of reality. If he invoked, rather, a historically and culturally bound, constructive realism (sic) he would be both at one with Margolis and right about mind and world.
This is all wrong.
First, the talk
of intermediaries in the adverbial sense. The point of talking of ‘adverbial’
instead of ‘relational’ here is to move us away from the very notion of there
being ‘intermediaries’ between mind and world in any substantive sense at all.
(The point is the same in Wittgenstein’s use of the term, “internal relation”:
this term is a transitional device to liberate the understanding so as to
recognise that one isn’t really speaking of a relation between two things
here, at all.) For McDowell (and recent Putnam) one does not
think of intermediaries between mind and world in this way because one does not
need to think of the mind in anything
like this way. Instead, one can think of the “mind as a structured system of
object-involving abilities” and not as an ‘organ’ modelled on the brain and
located in the head. Any talk of ‘intermediaries’ is then apt to mislead in
that it can lead one to imagine something(s)
as mediating between two other things.
This is exactly the picture we wish to be released from, the picture that
McDowell wants to dis-attach his readers from. Rather, for McDowell the
relationship between mind and world is internal.
Second, the idea that McDowell’s putative intermediaries are exclusively naturalistic in the biological sense is false. Margolis writes “by ‘natural’, I take him [McDowell] to mean that the conceptual competence answering to our predicative efforts belongs primarily to our biology but may, in some measure, manifest differences in saliency as a result of our encultured ‘second nature’ (our Bildung)” (P 51). The above comments regarding intermediaries aside, what might we make of this interpretation of McDowell? Well it is, to say the least, puzzling to those who have read McDowell. We should have thought in this respect McDowell’s references to Heidegger and Gadamer (in Mind & World), his emphasis on learning a la Wittgenstein (also in Mind & World and in many other papers) and his approving citation of Cavell’s ‘whole whirl of organism’ passage from “Must We Mean What We Say?” would have served to guard against such a misreading. These are a few of many points in McDowell’s writing where he explicitly contradicts Margolis’s ‘reading’ of him.
Indeed if
McDowell were claiming what Margolis attributes to him he would be explicitly
embracing one of the two positions he explicitly sets out to resist, i.e. the
Myth of the Given, in appealing to some point outside the space of reasons. This
said, McDowell wishes here to retain a sense of the ‘natural’ aspects of our
being, otherwise he would move to a position akin to that which Margolis
recommends. Margolis opts for the other (‘culturalist’) extreme and this is
also what McDowell explicitly resists, since it would leave us ‘spinning in a
frictionless void’, the content of our thoughts now without purchase on the
world. The lectures that make up Mind and
World attempt to find a middle-ground between these two untenable
‘alternatives’. Margolis fails to grasp this, and thus erroneously attributes
one of the two positions to McDowell -- and then recommends the other to him as
a way out!
We think the confusion may stem at base from two problems.
A. Margolis’s conception of a historically and culturally bound ‘constructive realism’ is not a form of realism that we find intelligible. Indeed, we suggest that he -- as McDowell does, following Wittgenstein -- should dispense with the realism–anti-realism dichotomy.
B. Margolis fails to appreciate the therapeutic nature of McDowell’s work. McDowell does not seek to provide an alternative theory of mind or of the relationship between mind and world. Rather, he seeks to dissolve the philosophical problem of mind and world by breaking the grip upon us of certain pictures which have led us to wrestle with the problem: the picture of the mind as a quasi-organ modelled on the brain and located in the head, the picture of non-adverbial (substantive) intermediaries which mediate between two externally related ‘entities’, etc.
McDowell writes, in a passage quoted and commented upon by Margolis, that: “we can regard the culture a human being is initiated into as a going concern; there is no particular reason why we should need to uncover or speculate about its history, let alone the origins of culture as such.” (McDowell, Mind & World: p. 163. cited in P 50) Margolis takes this all wrong. He takes McDowell to be saying that culture and history are of no relevance. Rather, McDowell’s point is that we need do no more than note their role in service of his and our therapeutic aim. Once we acknowledge the facts of history and culture as aspects of the human animal’s life with and in the world we need say no more, because we have done enough to loosen the grip of the previous (narrowly – ‘scientifically’ – naturalistic) picture of mind and world. In short, in this quote McDowell is primarily precisely not making a case for biological naturalism. And he goes no further because (again following Wittgenstein) he is not in the business of advancing philosophical theses (or worse, speculative anthropology) about how enculturation takes place.
Being admirers
of the work of philosophers such as Rorty, Putnam and McDowell, we had hoped to
learn more from the books under review here. Alas it was not to be so.
Unfortunately we found the problems we discuss in this review to be repeated in
various forms throughout these two
books. It is then inevitable that for some Margolis will give this way of doing
philosophy a bad name, a name that in the hands of others it does not deserve.
The writing of histories of our subject does not necessitate a lack of attention to detail, nor a simple lack
of philosophical acumen.
Communication
to phil_hutchinson@fastmail.fm
and/or r.read@uea.ac.uk