Brandon Beasley

One of contemporary pragmatism’s most lively intramural debates is about the status, priority, and emphasis that pragmatism should place on experience, on the one hand, versus language, on the other. Recently, an experientialist pragmatist has argued that the experience–language debate is not ‘really’ about issues of language and experience, but is rather a proxy for another issue: namely, pragmatism’s stance toward the practical world of everyday life and commitment to improving it. In other words, a commitment to meliorism. In this paper I argue that this strategy for cornering the linguistic pragmatist does not work, and that meliorism is not what the language versus experience debate is ‘really about’. First, I argue that the debate is not a proxy for a debate about meliorism, but rather is about exactly what it purports to be about: the place of language and experience in an account of the most basic features of what it is to be the kind of beings we are in the world in which we live. Second, I argue that one’s stance toward meliorism need not covary with whether one embraces either linguistic or experientialist pragmatism. Finally, I argue that to think that pragmatism must begin with meliorism is to put the cart before the horse. My aim is to clarify the import of the experience–language debate and direct the future of that debate back towards other, more fruitful paths recently opened up: those whose destination is overcoming the dichotomy by finding the right way to combine the best insights of both sides of the debate.

This book argues that pragmatism offers a solution to a fundamental problem in the philosophy of language and mind: namely, the problem of the place of conceptual meanings—and so human minds—in nature. It contends that a pragmatist approach to resolving the problem avoids the dual traps of either reductionist elimination of genuine meanings or rationalist metaphysical excess. The current intellectual, scientific, and cultural landscape is dominated by scientism, reductionism, and scepticism about such things as values, meanings, and everything that seems to make human life worth living. What, then, is the role of conceptual meanings in what makes human beings unique and important? This book contends that the true nature and depth of this problem is central to pragmatism, and that pragmatism offers the resources to overcome it. First, it demonstrates that radical semantic indeterminacy poses a real danger for all attempts to naturalize human mindedness. The author argues that meaning-destroying indeterminacy is a constant threat of attempts to naturalize meaning and mind, and that centring this aspect of the problem in constructing a version of pragmatism means that we will pay attention to it and thus avoid it, creating a more successful pragmatist approach to the problem of meaning and mind in nature. Second, the book shows that by paying close attention to the relation of meaning and habit in pragmatism, we can identify the threat of indeterminacy in existing pragmatisms and then rectify the problem by putting forward a better account of the relation of meaning and that does not face the threat of radical indeterminacy.

Huw Price has developed versions of naturalism and anti-representationalism to create a distinctive brand of pragmatism. ‘Subject naturalism’ focuses on what science says about human beings and the function of our linguistic practices, as opposed to orthodox contemporary naturalism’s privileging of the ontology of the natural sciences. Price’s anti-representationalism rejects the view that what makes utterances contentful is their representing reality. Together, they are to help us avoid metaphysical ‘placement problems’: how e.g. mind, meaning, and morality fit into the natural world. By combining subject naturalism and his own ‘global’ version of expressivism with Robert Brandom’s inferentialism about content, Price proposes a pragmatist ‘anthropology’ as a replacement for substantively metaphysical approaches to placement problems. In this paper I argue that Price’s project cannot succeed, and that this shows something important about what form pragmatism ought to take. Price’s view doesn’t work because no subject naturalist vocabulary is sufficient to describe any assertional practice; there is no way to connect his expressive-functionalist explanations to the practices and concepts which are their subject – nor, even, to the human subjects who are the focus of a philosophical anthropology. I close by suggesting how we might improve on these shortcomings of Price’s pragmatism.

In this journal, Robert Smithson argues that considerations stemming from Kantian and post-Kantian idealism undermine naturalistic arguments that seek to debunk elements of the ‘manifest image’ in favour of the ‘scientific image’. The idealist tradition, on this view, holds that philosophy’s task is to uncover and clarify the principles and norms which underlie different forms of inquiry, and is thus well placed to dispel the apparent ‘placement’ problems that stem from the collision of our ordinary worldview with contemporary philosophical naturalism. Smithson also argues that this idealist critique of naturalism is preferable to the Liberal Naturalist critique of naturalism. In this response, I argue that Smithson’s view contains a gap which the naturalist can exploit to evade idealist critique, but that a Hegelian idealism contains no such gap, making it the better idealist choice. Further, I argue that that Hegelian idealism is itself plausibly a version of liberal naturalism.