Cheryl Misak

Critical care medicine is suddenly, and unfortunately, in the news, with staggering numbers of COVID-19 patients requiring treatment in intensive care units around the world. Talk on the street, in those countries in which talk on the street is allowed, is of ventilators, ARDS, and cytokine storms—the overcharged immune response that itself is a killer. These technical terms are now in everyday use, and questions that have been restricted largely to critical care, infectious diseases, and public health specialists are being commonly asked. If it turns out that ventilators will be in heavy use, will we have enough of them to cope with the first, and next, waves of the...

This paper views Bernard Williams through the lens of the pragmatist tradition. The central insight of pragmatism is that philosophy must start with human practice, in contrast to high theory or metaphysics. Williams was one of the twentieth century’s most able proponents of this insight, especially when considering the topics of ethics and the law. Williams never saw himself as a pragmatist, because he took Richard Rorty’s radical relativism to be the exemplar of the position. But I shall suggest that had Williams seen himself as a more objective pragmatist, along the lines of C. S. Peirce, C. I. Lewis, or Frank Ramsey, he might have had the resources to settle vital issues on which he wavered, issues having to do with whether there is anything objective underpinning our deliberations.

This paper reframes the futility debate, moving away from the question “Who decides when to end what is considered to be a medically inappropriate or futile treatment?” and toward the question “How can society make policy that will best account for the multitude of values and conflicts involved in such decision-making?” It offers a pragmatist moral epistemology that provides us with (1) a clear justification of why it is important to take best standards, norms, and physician judgment seriously and (2) a clear justification of why ample opportunity must be made for patients, families, and society to challenge those standards and norms.

Frank Ramsey (1903-1930) is usually taken to be sympathetic to the Vienna Circle’s project. I will argue that this is not right. Ramsey was a pragmatist, and he put pragmatist objections to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, objections which also had the Vienna Circle as their target. Ramsey thought the Circle’s position (like Wittgenstein’s) was mistaken in that, instead of starting with human inquiry, it tried to construct the world out of elementary particulars and logic, and resulted in an unacceptable solipsism. This paper traces the trajectory of Ramsey’s pragmatist thought, and its relationship to the early Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle.

In the preface to this excellent book, Fraser MacBride says he decided to write it because he had "become convinced that there is far more to find out and far more to learn from the history of early analytic philosophy". He is right; the history of early analytic philosophy holds insights for us today, and most of them lie outside of what MacBride calls our "cartoon histories." In punchy prose, he mines gems from what one of his heroes, Frank Ramsey, called "that great muddle the theory of universals."The subtitle of the book carries considerable weight. This is not just a much-needed genealogy of the theory of universals and particulars. It is a re-think of the beginnings of analytic philosophy. The standard...

Necessity is a touchstone issue in the thought of Charles Peirce, not least because his pragmatist account of meaning relies upon modal terms. We here offer an overview of Peirce’s highly original and multi-faceted take on the matter. We begin by considering how a self-avowed pragmatist and fallibilist can even talk about necessary truth. We then outline the source of Peirce’s theory of representation in his three categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, (monadic, dyadic and triadic relations). These have modal purport insofar as the first category corresponds to possibility, the second to mechanical necessity and the third to a kind of semantic or intentional necessity. We then turn to Peirce’s explicit modal epistemology and show how it began as information-relative, with different modalities (e.g. logical, physical, practical) distinguished in terms of respective ‘designated states of information’, and shifted later in his life towards a more robust realism founded in direct perception of ideas in their relations. We then turn to Peirce’s formal logic, focusing on his diagrammatic system of Existential Graphs where he did his most serious logical research. Finally we discuss Peirce’s modal metaphysics and its implications for determinism and realism about universals.

My title is of course drawn from William James's Pragmatism: A New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking. The five excellent critics of Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein have zeroed in on the profound questions at the heart of pragmatism. All of us working in the tradition should thank them, and I happily do so. In what follows, I will explore the supposed differences between their views and my own. I hope to persuade my critics that sometimes there is no difference; that sometimes there is a fruitful difference; and that it does indeed make a difference to differentiate pragmatism from other positions.A running theme in the commentaries is my distinction between a more objective...

I was one of the group that produced “An Official ATS/AACN/ACCP/ESICM/SCCM Policy Statement: Responding to Requests for Futile and Potentially Inappropriate Treatments in Intensive Care Units”. I do not write on that group’s behalf, but rather from two distinct perspectives which converge onto one view. First, I am a philosopher who thinks about our most pressing questions, such as how to make treatment decisions when a life is coming to an end. From that perspective, three of us from the group tried to set out the philosophical position that seemed to underpin the Multiorganization Policy Statement. That deliberativist position holds that...

Cheryl Misak argues that truth ought to be reinstated to a central position in moral and political philosophy. She argues that the correct account of truth is one found in a certain kind of pragmatism: a true belief is one upon which inquiry could not improve, a belief which would not be defeated by experience and argument. This account is not only an improvement on the views of central figures such as Rawls and Habermas, but it can also make sense of the idea that, despite conflict, pluralism, and the expression of difference, our moral and political beliefs aim at truth and can be subject to criticism. Anyone interested in a fresh discussion of political theory and philosophy will find this a fascinating read.

Cheryl Misak offers a strikingly new view of the development of philosophy in the twentieth century. Pragmatism, the home-grown philosophy of America, thinks of truth not as a static relation between a sentence and the believer-independent world, but rather, a belief that works. The founders of pragmatism, Peirce and James, developed this idea in more and less objective ways. The standard story of the reception of American pragmatism in England is that Russell and Moore savaged James's theory, and that pragmatism has never fully recovered. An alternative, and underappreciated, story is told here. The brilliant Cambridge mathematician, philosopher and economist, Frank Ramsey, was in the mid-1920s heavily influenced by the almost-unheard-of Peirce and was developing a pragmatist position of great promise. He then transmitted that pragmatism to his friend Wittgenstein, although had Ramsey lived past the age of 26 to see what Wittgenstein did with that position, Ramsey would not have liked what he saw.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of TruthCheryl MisakRobert B. Westbrook Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. xvi + 246 pp.Robert Westbrook, who in my view is our best intellectual historian of pragmatism, has written what is sure to be a major contribution to the study of pragmatist political theory, a branch of political theory which has recently seen a salutary surge of interest. Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth is beautifully written, with a steady eye on the non-philosopher, yet it is sophisticated and nuanced so as to engage the most careful philosophers in the field and to genuinely advance current debates.It is interesting to see just what benefits come from having such an excellent intellectual historian take the long and wide view on pragmatism. For instance, Westbrook doesn't merely look at the classical pragmatist he thinks has the most important things to say about politics. Dewey is usually is taken to be the pragmatist of choice in political theory, although I myself have been rather single-minded about Peirce's implied account of politics. Westbrook gives us excellent accounts of Dewey and Peirce, but he also looks at James, at Mead, at how pragmatism and Marxism have had an off-again, on-again relationship, etc. That is, he gives us a panoramic view of how the pragmatists—classical and contemporary—line up in political theory. This is not only extremely useful to any student of pragmatism, but it is fascinating as well.Westbrook's abilities as an intellectual historian also have him making bang-on points about the debate within pragmatism for the heart and soul of pragmatism. Pragmatism, he says, has always been less a coherent philosophical school than a contentious family of thinkers holding distinct but related positions on the "workmanlike" nature of knowledge, meaning, and truth (p.1).The central debate within pragmatism is between those who take pragmatism to be akin to post-modern views, where there is no truth and objectivity to be had anywhere, and those who take pragmatism to promise a less absolutist account of truth—an account of truth on which we can make sense of aiming at the truth. On the one side of the debate we have Rorty and his [End Page 279] predecessors saying that there is no truth at which we might aim—only solidarity or agreement within a community. In some moods he goes as far as claiming that truth and objectivity are nothing more than what our peers will let us get away with saying. On the other side of the divide, we have those who think of pragmatism as rejecting an ahistorical, transcendental, or metaphysical theory of truth, but nonetheless being committed to doing justice to the objective dimension of human inquiry—to the fact that those engaged in deliberation and investigation take themselves to be aiming at getting things right, avoiding mistakes, and improving their beliefs and theories. On this more objective kind of pragmatism, the fact that our inquiries are historically situated does not entail that they lack objectivity. And the fact that standards of objectivity themselves come into being and evolve does not strip them of their worth. In James' well-known words, the trail of the human serpent is over everything, but (as James himself may or may not have seen) this does not toss us into a sea of arbitrariness, where there is no truth or where truth varies from person to person and culture to culture. Westbrook puts the issue nicely: "Post-modernist skeptics and their few neopragmatist admirers turn to the old pragmatists because they (correctly) see them as potential partners in a struggle against 'strong', that is, absolutist and 'totalizing', conceptions of truth. But what they neglect is the old pragmatists' conviction (shared by many neopragmatists) that once they had overcome absolutism, they could then resume traveling down the road of inquiry in a more fuel-efficient vehicle than Reason toward a more modest destination than Truth" (p. 7).Westbrook aligns himself with the kind of pragmatism that aims to take account of our human cognitive aspirations...

It seems that no philosopher these days wants a theory of truth which can be accused of being metaphysical. But even if we agree that grandiose metaphysics is to be spurned, even if we agree that our theory of truth should be a deflated one, the controversy does not die down. A variety of deflationist options present themselves. Some, with Richard Rorty, take the notion of truth to be so wedded to metaphysics that we are advised to drop it altogether. Others, with Paul Horwich, take the disquotational or equivalence schema—'p' is T if and only if p—to completely capture the content of the predicate 'is true'. And others argue that there is a conception of truth to be had which is non-metaphysical but which goes beyond the triviality expressed by the disquotational schema.