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...

: C.S. Peirce is infamous for his assertion that the ideas of truth and belief are out of place in vital or ethical matters. We must go on instinct and custom. But he also asserts that his view of truth is applicable to ethics - a true belief about what is right or wrong is the belief that would stand up to all deliberation, experience and argument. I shall resolve this tension in Peirce's work in favor of the cognitivist reading. That is, I shall argue that Peirce presents us with an attractive view of truth which makes sense of the thought that our moral judgements aspire to truth.Key-words: truth, inquiry, Experience, belief, ethics.Resumo: C.S. Peirce é famoso por sua afirmação de que as idéias de verdade e crença não se relacionam a questões vitais ou éticas. Devemos contar com o instinto e o costume. Mas ele também afirma que sua visão da verdade é aplicável à ética - uma crença verdadeira a respeito do que é certo ou errado é a crença que suportaria toda deliberação, experiência e argumentação. Eu solucionarei essa tensão na obra de Peirce em favor da leitura cognitivista. Em outras palavras, argumentarei que Peirce nos apresenta uma visão atrativa da verdade, que compreende a idéia de que nossos juízos morais aspiram à verdade.Palavras-chave: verdade, inquirição, experiência, crença, ética.

The pragmatist view of politics is at its very heart epistemic, for it treats morals and politics as a kind of deliberation or inquiry, not terribly unlike other kinds of inquiry. With the exception of Richard Rorty, the pragmatists argue that morals and politics, like science, aim at the truth or at getting things right and that the best method for achieving this aim is a method they sometimes call the scientific method or the method of intelligence – what would now be termed deliberative democracy. Hence, the pragmatists offer an argument for democracy which appeals to the quality of the decisions supplied by democratic procedure. Why should we value decisions that are the products of voting after open debate over private decision-making and then voting, over bargaining, or over elimination of those who disagree with us? We should value them because the deliberative democratic method is more likely to give us true or right or justified answers to our questions. Rorty, of course, thinks that no inquiry aims at the truth and that nothing about pragmatism speaks in democracy's favor. This paper will show how his brand of pragmatism betrays what is good and deeply interesting in the pragmatist tradition.

Frank Ramsey is usually taken to be an emotivist or an expressivist about the good: he is usually taken to bifurcate inquiry into fact-stating and non-fact stating domains, ethics falling into the latter. In this paper I shall argue that whatever the very young Ramsey's view might have been, towards the end of his short life, he was coming to a through-going and objective pragmatism about all our beliefs, including those about the good, beauty, and even the meaning of life. Ethical beliefs are not mere expressions of emotion, but rather fall under our cognitive scope. They can be assessed as rational or irrational, true or false.

This commentary explores the disagreement between Alex Klein and Cheryl Misak about the core insights of American Pragmatism, against a background of agreement. Both take the history of early American pragmatism to be a vital part of the history of analytic philosophy, not a radical break with it. But Misak argues that James seeks to loosen the usual epistemic standards so that religious and scientific belief can both be justified by a unitary set of evidentiary rules, and Klein argues that James’s aim is not primarily to seek a rationale or justification for religious belief. At the heart of the debate is a matter still very much alive in philosophy of science: the nature and status of indispensability arguments or arguments purporting to show that we need to assume some things in order to conduct inquiry.