Roberto Gronda

Cet article pose les bases d’une analyse philosophique des problèmes publics. Nous partons du constat qu’aucun problème dans la sphère publique ne naît comme public — il le devient — et que ce processus de devenir public requiert une explication. Après avoir introduit notre sujet (section 1), nous le recontextualisons dans le cadre plus large de l’étude de la nature des problèmes et des activités de résolution de problèmes (section 2). Nous écartons ensuite certaines manières, parfois intuitives mais inopérantes, d’expliquer la nature des problèmes publics, qui consistent respectivement à les assimiler à des problèmes sociaux, à des problèmes juridiques ou à des pratiques qui, par leur nature, épuisent ou alimentent les biens publics (section 3). Nous examinons alors le changement qui s’opère lorsqu’un problème devient public, en suggérant que c’est dans ce changement que réside la clé permettant d’évaluer et de justifier le caractère public d’un problème donné (section 4). Enfin, nous formulons quatre questions ouvertes qu’il reste à traiter afin de fournir une approche unifiée des problèmes dans la sphère publique (section 5).

This book provides new perspectives on the twentieth-century history of philosophy of science through the person of Ernest Nagel. Being one of the philosophical and institutional motors of the new discipline of philosophy of science, Ernest Nagel is still much underappreciated by scholars. By including a major intellectual biography of Nagel’s life and works (written by his daughter Yvonne Nagel and narrated through the personal correspondence of Ernest Nagel), this book provides a unique opportunity for researchers. The Nagel-Hempel correspondence is published here for the very first time, enabling scholars to get a sense of how logical empiricism emigrated to the States, got acclimatized, and took over American philosophy in less than two decades.

Cet article pose les bases d’une analyse philosophique des problèmes publics. Nous partons du constat qu’aucun problème dans la sphère publique ne naît comme public — il le devient — et que ce processus de devenir public requiert une explication. Après avoir introduit notre sujet (section 1), nous le recontextualisons dans le cadre plus large de l’étude de la nature des problèmes et des activités de résolution de problèmes (section 2). Nous écartons ensuite certaines manières, parfois intuitives mais inopérantes, d’expliquer la nature des problèmes publics, qui consistent respectivement à les assimiler à des problèmes sociaux, à des problèmes juridiques ou à des pratiques qui, par leur nature, épuisent ou alimentent les biens publics (section 3). Nous examinons alors le changement qui s’opère lorsqu’un problème devient public, en suggérant que c’est dans ce changement que réside la clé permettant d’évaluer et de justifier le caractère public d’un problème donné (section 4). Enfin, nous formulons quatre questions ouvertes qu’il reste à traiter afin de fournir une approche unifiée des problèmes dans la sphère publique (section 5).

Trust in science is a multifaceted phenomenon. The goal of our essay is to shed light on the kind of trust that citizens or laypeople should place in scientific experts as public problem-solvers. Our thesis is that such form of trust in science, which we call epistemic-pragmatist public trust, has unique features that prompt an ad hoc account. Traditional accounts of epistemic public trust are predicated on two conditions: citizens are justified in trusting scientific experts if the latter (a) are endowed with scientific competence and (b) are honest in rendering their testimony. We show that it is easy to find examples in which those conditions are met, and yet citizens are justified in not trusting scientific experts as public problem-solvers. We argue, therefore, that a further condition is needed to account for epistemic-pragmatist public trust: epistemic wisdom, namely, the ability to apply universal knowledge to highly specific public problems.

Pragmatism is usually referred to as the first original American philosophical tradition, and it is believed to have gradually disappeared from the debate in the 1950s, concomitantly with the rise of logical empiricism and analytic philosophy. As has been observed by many historians of American thought, however, such a description of the role and place of pragmatism in the history of American philosophy is controversial, not to say highly problematic (Gross 2002). Even though it may be legitimate for theoretical purposes – in that it may provide, for instance, a normative account of what American philosophy should be, as well as a normative image of what is truly ›American‹ in the history of American philosophy, thus providing a set of criteria to tell it apart from other, less genuine strains of thought – it is not sound from a strictly historiographical point of view. First of all, even if it is true that pragmatism faded in importance in American philosophy after the 1950s, it is not correct to argue that it did not exert any influence on analytic philosophy. Secondly, as far as its origins are concerned, at the time pragmatism became influential in the American philosophical debate, other traditions of thought were lively and well received among academic circles. As a matter of fact, the rise of pragmatism coincided with the professionalization of philosophy in the United States, but it was not the only factor that prompted such movement towards a higher standard of philosophical clarity and precision; rather the contrary, pragmatism as we know it is largely the outcome of the way in which classical pragmatists engaged with other traditions of thought. The entry will proceed in a chronological order to assess and revise the view of the eclipse of pragmatism in the US-American philosophical debate.

The topic of common sense is central to pragmatism. In different ways, Peirce, James and Dewey all wrote extensively on that notion, highlighting its theoretical complexity as well as its heuristic function in philosophical inquiry. It can well be established, therefore, that common sense represents a pivotal term within the pragmatist tradition in that it intersects with many other key-concepts such as the primacy of practice, contextualism, cognitive pluralism, the implicit dimension of action (know-how), the irreducibility of the ordinary world to the descriptions provided by the sciences, pragmatic realism – to name only the most relevant ones. In light of all that, it should not be surprising that even now the notion of common sense continues to receive attention from contemporary pragmatists. So, for instance, Nicholas Rescher has published a book, entitled Common sense (2005), in which he argues against those philosophical approaches that downplay the epistemological importance of common sense, and tries to provide »a fundamentally pragmatic construal of the conception of commonsense beliefs« (ibid., 42).

Husserl is one of the authors who most influenced Preti’s thought. Starting from his early texts, Husserl represents a constant and, most importantly, a dynamic presence in Preti’s work. Indeed, Husserlian philosophy, along with the transcendental philosophy to which it ultimately belongs, constitutes the theoretical core of the rationalistic themes that are central to Preti’s philosophy. The aim of the present essay is to investigate the various forms and ways in which Husserl’s philosophy exerted an influence on Preti’s thought: firstly as essential to the definition of what Preti called “the principle of immanence;” then, in combination with insights drawn from pragmatism and logical empiricism, as functional in developing his Neo-Enlightenment proposal; finally, in his last works, as central to rethinking of the theoretical outcomes reached over the course of the previous decade.

Roberto Gronda & Tullio Viola – Your work is frequently referred to as “pragmatic history.” This notion, however, is by no means a new one: Polybius spoke of pragmatikê historia, Germany had pragmatische Geschichte in the tradition of Kantian anthropology. Can you tell us something about how you understand this label, and about your own encounter with “pragmatic history”? Simona Cerutti – Personally, I had quite an idiosyncratic introduction to pragmatic history, although this encounter was n...

Recent times have witnessed that democracy and science may easily be in conflict. The goal of the paper is to reframe the issue of the relations between democracy and science in a way that makes it possible to preserve the distinction between the two, while rejecting the pessimistic view that their conflict is harmful. To achieve this goal, I will refine Dewey’s concept of public so as to develop a semantic interpretation of it grounded on the notion of articulation. My proposal is to conceive of the public as a logical space not reducible to that of science, in which the truths discovered by scientists are renegotiated through a process of interaction between the experts and the citizens.

The preservation of biodiversity is one of the greatest concerns of our age. However, a satisfactory operational definition of biodiversity is still lacking, and it is likely that it won’t be achieved in the near future. In their practice of measurement scientists adopt a pluralistic and multi-dimensional metric – an approach which is widely accepted, but not theoretically justified. The goal of this paper is to account for such pluralistic approach. Our solution is pragmatist: we hold that the pragmatic maxim highlights the fact-value entanglement intrinsic to the concept of biodiversity. On this basis, we argue that the axiological dimension is essential to the meaning of the concept since its extension cannot be fixed independently of it.

In this article we develop a pragmatist-inspired notion of intelligence that should lead to a better understanding of the notion of scientific expertise. The notion of intelligence is drawn from Dewey and is therefore used here in its technical sense. Our thesis is that scientific knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient condition for scientific expertise; intelligence should also be added. Conceived of as the capacity to apply general knowledge to particulars, we reach the conclusion that intelligence is a necessary requirement for scientific experts in the wake of Dewey’s logic of inquiry. In particular, we argue that an all-important task that scientific experts are asked to accomplish, and which puts their expertise to the test, is to transform indeterminate situations into problematic situations, and that such a goal can only be achieved if scientific experts succeed in paying attention to all the contingent and precarious aspects that make the situation they face unique.

The article deals with John Hermann Randall’s theory of history, namely, the philosophical account of what it takes for an object to be a historical object. The goal of the article is to highlight the deep connections existing between Randall’s philosophical views on history and the writing of history, heavily indebted to Dewey’s and Woodbridge naturalism (the so-called Columbia Naturalism), and his historiographical work. In the first section, I briefly sketch some major aspects of originality of Randall’s historiographical work, as well as the intellectual context to which he belonged. In the second section I lay out the most important features of Columbia Naturalism. In the third section I discuss in detail Randall’s theory of history, focusing on its ontological, epistemic, and epistemological features. In the fourth section, I confront Lovejoy and Randall’s historiographical works in order to show how philosophical theories affect historiographical practices.

In our paper we aim to update and revise the pragmatist conception of the relationship between science and common sense. First of all, we introduce two technical notions (MI and SI), with which we identify the normative spaces of the manifest and the scientific image, and we highlight the differences between these two notions and their Sellarsian cognates. Secondly, within each normative space we investigate the connections between languages and practices: we ground linguistic contents on the normative relations that are established in the practices of the corresponding normative space. Finally, we rely on Brandom’s meaning-use analysis to provide a representation of the different ways in which MI and SI practices and languages may interact. Our pragmatist proposal is to trace back the ontological conflict that is usually believed to exist between scientific and common sense objects to the differences between scientific and common sense practices.

Dewey’s Lectures in China 1919–1920 is a highly controversial text. For many years, scholars have been suspicious about its reliability as a source: the book is an English translation of the Chinese translation of two series of lectures that Dewey held in China during the first year of his two year stay. For this reason, Deweyan scholars have tended to dismiss the text: they believed that Dewey’s speeches had been manipulated by Chinese translators driven less by textual fidelity than by a partisan desire to use Dewey’s words as a powerful intellectual weapon in their political struggle to modernize the country. It is impossible to really know – that was the bottom-line argument – what Dewey...

In this paper, I address the question of the nature and ground of objectivity, with the aim to develop a pragmatist account of its distinctive features. Traditionally, pragmatism has been considered as an alternative to Kantian approaches. The aim of the paper is to argue that, contrary to the received view, a consistent pragmatist theory of objectivity should preserve many insights of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. My thesis is that Kantian notions of spontaneity, activity and objectivity can be fruitfully reformulated and translated into pragmatist terms. The key notion here is that of practices. It is only within the context of a practice that concepts can be successfully applied to experience. The intrinsic normativity of practices establishes different levels of objectivity. The paper defends a pluralistic view of reality, insisting on the irreducibility of common-sense objectivity to scientific objectivity. At the same time, it is maintained that common-sense practices have a primacy over scientific practices, and that scientific objects are constructed out of common-sense objects through a process of articulation of the potentialities of the latter.

This paper aims to investigate the transformations undergone by Dewey’s philosophy in the period from 1916 to 1921. By analyzing three different problematic situations with which Dewey found himself confronted (German militarism; the effects of propaganda on American society; the experience of a two-year stay in China), the paper seeks to show the various lines of development at work in his thought. The thesis of the paper is that in the war and immediately post-war years Dewey was concerned with outlining a new account of the nature of theory which was preliminary to the formulation of his social philosophy. The paper presents Dewey’s main philosophical achievements, with the aim of providing some background knowledge that could be useful to understanding that place and significance of the Lectures in China in the overall context of his thought.

SummaryThe idea of interdisciplinarity can be articulated in different ways. The aim of the article is to criticise the view that interdisciplinarity is to be treated as a quality of the historian's approach to his subject-matter, and to argue for a constructivist interpretation of that notion. A constructivist account of interdisciplinarity relies on the thesis that the latter is one of the manifold ways in which it is possible to give sense to the historical records of which the historian wants to gain knowledge. In the paper it is maintained that the function of the notion of interdisciplinarity is to account for the clash of languages that can be found when disciplines converge. This new paradigm is highlighted by taking into consideration the history of American pragmatism.