First of all, we should mention for the sake, for the viewers, that Dewey's first pragmatist

paper was called "The Reflex Arc in Psychology." An unlikely title. Many people don't know.

Everyone knows that James was both a philosopher and a psychologist, the famous joke which

my father already told me was, you know, that the James brothers, one of them writes novels

that read like psychology books and the other writes psychology books that read like novels.

But in fact John Dewey was also a professor psychology although he was not as good a psychologist

as James in his, the period when he was producing his psychology.

But, and I agree that he carried the idea of overcoming Cartesian dualism with respect

to perception further than James, although James, I think, was the first modern philosopher

to go in that direction. Husserl, himself, always credited James with inspiring his attempts

in that direction. So that's a very important con—and there are philosophers now, analytic

philosophers going in the same direction who never cite either James or Husserl, anyone

outside of analytic philosophy.

It's as if this was rediscovered in Oxford, you know, people called disjunctivists, which

John McDowell is one. They trace this back to some paper written in Oxford in 1963 or

something that there, the American realists or Russell in a certain period or James or

Dewey are just outside. This is what worries me about analytic philosophy.

Having become a movement, it's become an exclusionary movement, and that is what I want to warn

against.

But the verificationism is not incompatible with realism about perception. The problem

is that I think both James and Dewey have a tendency to write as if what's really there

is what they call, what Dewey calls qualities, and what James calls pure experience.

And I think Reichenbach put his finger on something when he said when it comes to unobservable

things, things like electrons, then they tend to sound positivist.

They have trouble extending their ontology, to use Quine's term, to include the theoretical

entities of modern physics. They tend to...in fact Dewey called himself an instrumentalist.

They go instrumentalist there.

I don't call myself a pragmatist. For one thing I don't like the pragmatist theory of

truth, which they were too proud of.

I thought the theory of truth is a mistake and for that matter the so-called pragmatic

maxim, their rule for making our ideas clear, namely, see what actions they would lead to

as a general theory of meaning I think it's a disaster.

I think the reason it was not, did not produce disastrously bad philosophy is they made a

rather restricted application.

I think for James in practice -- Peirce is a different kind of philosopher, and we can

talk about him separately -- but for Peirce -- for James and for Dewey what the pragmatic

maxim meant in their writing, they applied it to philosophical positions. What they meant

was we should ask what difference a philosophical position makes to the way people live.

What would it, and Dewey as an educator often asked what difference would it make to education

if we accepted this view on free will or that view on free will. That's one of the examples

I use when he writes on free will.

That seems to me healthy.

That doesn't commit you to a general view about what meaning is for any statement at

all.

But the turn to let's now try and think that philosophical positions certainly over the,

over a century or more, usually not very quickly, but over a century or more philosophical positions

if they're well-known have an influence on public debate and sometimes on public life

for many centuries. Think of Aristotle, Plato, Kant, etc.

And so that I. And I think it's interesting because James, the metaphysical position of

James which I'm most interested in, is his position on perception and Russell who detested

James' theory of truth published a book, the analysis of mind in which he says I follow

the lead here of the American new realists whose leader is William James.

Now I just. What I have against Russell is when he wrote about James in his history of

western philosophy he should have said although I dislike that side of James, I myself have

been terribly influenced by this other side of James. I think Russell was rather forgetful

and he simply forgot that he had in 1915 published a book that he said whose leading idea he

said came from James.

And Dewey almost never, in fact, employs the pragmatic maxim. In his work on, what I call

his work on epistemology, although he didn't like the term epistemology, Logic: the Theory

of Inquiry, the pragmatist theory of truth is only mentioned in one footnote. So I think

there's a lot one can find in the pragmatists without being oneself a pragmatist.

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