Pragmatism: An Open Question

Putnam treats pragmatism as an ongoing line of inquiry rather than a settled system with a creed. Peirce, James, and Dewey disagreed with one another on important matters, and he argues that later philosophers should continue that inquiry instead of treating any one thinker's formulation as definitive. The title signals his view that the central pragmatist commitments, fallibilism, the interdependence of belief and action, and the rejection of rigid dichotomies, are worth defending but remain subject to revision. This framing also lets him separate what he regards as pragmatism's enduring insights from positions he thinks later writers attached to it unnecessarily.

Both philosophers claimed the pragmatist inheritance and both rejected a God's-eye view of reality, but they drew different conclusions. Rorty argued that truth and objectivity are best replaced by solidarity and the continuing conversation of a community. Putnam held that this loses the ability to criticize a community's practices from within inquiry and that truth must remain answerable to experience and to norms of reasonableness. He saw Dewey and Peirce as supporting a realism of this chastened kind. The disagreement is among the most discussed in late twentieth-century American philosophy.

Putnam argues that factual inquiry depends on epistemic values such as coherence, plausibility, and simplicity, so facts and values are not cleanly separable. If scientific reasoning already involves evaluation, then the claim that only scientific description is objective cannot be sustained, and ethical claims need not be dismissed as mere expressions of preference. He credits the pragmatists, especially Dewey, with anticipating this point. The argument is meant to show that ethics can be treated as a domain of inquiry subject to reasons and revision, not that moral questions are as easy to settle as empirical ones.

Putnam draws on Dewey to argue that democracy is more than a procedure for aggregating votes. It is a form of social life that supports collective inquiry, since solving problems depends on hearing diverse experiences and revising beliefs in light of them. On this reading the epistemic and political values of pragmatism reinforce one another: fallibilism about belief supports openness and participation in public life. The treatment is a short sketch rather than a developed political theory, and readers wanting detail should turn to Dewey's own writings on democracy and education.

It continues themes from Reason, Truth and History and Renewing Philosophy, in which he criticized metaphysical realism and reductionism and defended an account of truth tied to rational inquiry. Here he reads those commitments as part of a pragmatist heritage, which gives his late position a historical lineage. Readers following his development will see how his earlier internal realism gave way to a more explicitly pragmatist and, later, natural-realist outlook. The book is therefore useful as a bridge between his technical philosophy of language and his broader concerns with ethics and democracy.

A common misreading holds that pragmatism equates truth with whatever is useful or whatever works for an individual. Putnam argues that the classical pragmatists were concerned with inquiry and the fixing of belief under the pressure of experience, and that their view of truth is bound up with objectivity and correction, not convenience. He also cautions against assuming that every writer called a pragmatist shares the same view. Reading the tradition as a cynical doctrine about utility misses its fallibilism and its insistence that beliefs can be mistaken.