Torjus Midtgarden

Roberto Frega’s Practice, Judgement, and the Challenge of Moral and Political Disagreement is exegetically, as well as systematically, ambitious: it explores several key texts of Charles Peirce and John Dewey in order to develop a pragmatist conception of practical rationality in the context of contemporary moral and political philosophy. Frega’s book differs from other recent comparable contributions, such as those of Cheryl Misak, Eric MacGilvray, and Robert Talisse, by drawing most heavily on Dewey’s works. Yet, similar to Misak, MacGilvray and Talisse, Frega puts pragmatism to the test by applying it to deep moral disagreements in modern societies and does so without relying on facts about American cultural..

James W. Carey saw a tension between two views of communication in John Dewey’s work: a transmission view which takes communication as transmission of messages for the control of distance and people, and a ritual view which conceives communication as constructing and maintaining a cultural world. This article shows how Dewey may be seen to apply both views in analysing two complementary aspects of communication. It points out how Dewey’s naturalistic perspectives on culture and meaning provide a basis for his analysis and have affinities with Carey’s cultural approach to communication. The article further considers Dewey’s analysis through Carey’s critical reminder that models of communication serve both as representations and as guidance for action. Finally, Dewey’s and Carey’s approaches are contrasted by focusing on their epistemological and ontological underpinnings.

Scholars like Alison Kadlec, Melvin Rogers and R.W. Hildreth have recently confronted the claim that Dewey’s pragmatism lacks resources to approach issues of power, but they have not given a unified account of what theoretical framework Dewey’s pragmatism provides to grapple with such issues and to articulate standards for social criticism. In this article, I explore one such framework: Dewey’s outline of a social philosophy developed in his Lectures in China. Here, Dewey derives immanent standards for social criticism through sociological and historical perspectives. Such standards are articulated in terms of social relationships of mutuality and recognition in and between groups; on such standards, social institutions and practices are to be criticized in so far as they embody relationships of domination disabling individual development and social and political participation. Dewey’s critical project extends to cultural sources of normative authority, and I further explore his social philosophy in terms of an ‘immanent cultural criticism’.

This article explores John Dewey’s conceptualization of the public as polity in his lecture notes from 1928. Dewey’s conceptualization suggests an account of the democratic legitimacy of public regulation of economic activities by focusing on polity members’ mutual interest. Contextualized through Dewey’s involvement in practical politics the article specifies the conceptualization by a policy focus on natural resources and technology, and explores and discusses it through two issues for democratic control over policy development: centralization of power in federal government; and the failure to understand, predict and control consequences of technology. Finally, exploring its relevance in a context of economic globalization the article rearticulates the conceptualization in terms of transnational relations and solidarities, using the transnational peasant organization La Via Campesina as an example.

Taking as its exegetic point of departure Peirce's outline of a semiotic theory of cognition from the mid 1890s, this paper explores the relevance of this outline to a theory of learning and also to a broader, normative vision of education. Firstly, besides providing for fallibilism in philosophical inquiry Peirce's outline accords with critical strategies of his fellow pragmatists, such as William James's detection of the ‘psychologist's fallacy’ and John Dewey's rejection of the ‘philosophical fallacy’. It is pointed out that this merit of Peirce's outline is due to his abstract and often neglected notion of a prespecialised scientific intelligence. Secondly, the paper shows that Peirce's semiotic approach to prescientific learning processes conditioning all kinds of theoretical activity may indeed complement James's and Dewey's contributions: giving careful attention to the work of linguistic and paralinguistic signs in such learning processes Peirce's analysis captures indexical and iconic aspects, as well as symbolic aspects of linguistic interaction and experientially constrained dialogue. Following Peirce's analysis the paper considers how the iconicity of linguistic structure, ostensive acts and the practical situatedness of language use are pre‐conditions of experiential learning in every day life as well as in scientific learning. It is also shown how this semiotic analysis is connected with Peirce's important notion of abduction. Finally, it is pointed out that a broader vision of education may issue from Peirce's semiotic analysis and that such a vision would emphasise that the life experience of individuals entering educational institutions should be made to bear on the objectives as well as the teaching practices of educational institutions.

In Rawls, Dewey and Constructivism Eric Thomas Weber focuses on the epistemological basis of John Rawls’ political philosophy and discusses such basis through two different lenses. Firstly, relying on Tom Rockmore’s recent interpretation of Kant, Weber qualifies Rawls’ work against the background of Kant’s epistemology and its tensions between constructivism and representationalism. While the term “constructivism” here applies broadly to epistemological positions holding ‘the objects of knowledge to be affected or conditioned by the knower’, “representationalism” covers any epistemological approach taken as ‘requiring an analysis of the relation of a representation to an independent object … as it...

Pippin, Pinkard and Brandom are rightly seen as representatives of a distinct approach in contemporary Hegel scholarship. Still, their interpretations diverge due to different definitions and uses of conceptions of discursive practice. We focus on three ways in which such definitions and uses bear on their interpretations. First, while Lumsden has recently criticized Pinkard and Brandom for ‘discursive bias’ in their accounts of the contestation and upheaval of normative authority in Hegel’s Phenomenology, we note that Pinkard distinguishes between various modes of reason-giving, and we argue that a further qualification of interdependencies between these modes may support his interpretation against such criticism. Second, Pinkard and Pippin have recently criticized Brandom’s conception of discursive score-keeping practice, and Pippin in particular has argued that the latter rests on an individualistic reductionism about content foreign to Hegel. However, we find that the real issue is that the modes of methodological abstraction and idealization assumed for Brandom’s conception of discursive practice leave out of account the historical alteration as well as the institutional embodiment of normative authority as emphasized by Pippin and Pinkard. Third, while Pippin and Pinkard both make Hegel’s notion of modern ethical life bear on a conception of practical rationality, their uses of a conception of discursive practice in such an undertaking betray divergent conceptions of the sociality of rational agents.

Taking as its exegetic point of departure Peirce's outline of a semiotic theory of cognition from the mid 1890s, this paper explores the relevance of this outline to a theory of learning and also to a broader, normative vision of education. Firstly, besides providing for fallibilism in philosophical inquiry Peirce's outline accords with critical strategies of his fellow pragmatists, such as William James's detection of the ‘psychologist's fallacy’ and John Dewey's rejection of the ‘philosophical fallacy’. It is pointed out that this merit of Peirce's outline is due to his abstract and often neglected notion of a prespecialised scientific intelligence. Secondly, the paper shows that Peirce's semiotic approach to prescientific learning processes conditioning all kinds of theoretical activity may indeed complement James's and Dewey's contributions: giving careful attention to the work of linguistic and paralinguistic signs in such learning processes Peirce's analysis captures indexical and iconic aspects, as well as symbolic aspects of linguistic interaction and experientially constrained dialogue. Following Peirce's analysis the paper considers how the iconicity of linguistic structure, ostensive acts and the practical situatedness of language use are pre‐conditions of experiential learning in every day life as well as in scientific learning. It is also shown how this semiotic analysis is connected with Peirce's important notion of abduction. Finally, it is pointed out that a broader vision of education may issue from Peirce's semiotic analysis and that such a vision would emphasise that the life experience of individuals entering educational institutions should be made to bear on the objectives as well as the teaching practices of educational institutions

: This paper considers Peirce's epistemology against the background of its Kantian legacy. While various interpreters like R. Rorty, K.-O. Apel and J. Habermas have claimed that Peirce remained a Kantian philosopher, the thesis defended here is that Peirce rejected several of Kant's epistemological dichotomies, such as the transcendental-empirical and the a priori-a posteriori dichotomy. In particular, the paper considers an epistemological project which has been largely neglected in the literature: Peirce's semiotic analysis of assertions. This analysis reconstructs various sign forms as elements of assertions and as pre-theoretic conditions for formal logic and for scientific inquiry. The paper shows how this analysis bears on modern philosophical research on indexicals, and also on pragmatically oriented philosophy of language more generally

Thora Margareta Bertilsson's book is an extended edition of her doctoral dissertation originally written in 1978, with a new foreword and preface and one new chapter. The thematic link between her original text and the new texts in the book is Charles Peirce's Theory of Inquiry. Yet, whereas the original text focuses on the relevance of Peirce's theory for the social study of science, the new contribution also focuses on Peirce's relevance for sociology and social theory more generally. This shift of focus may partly be seen in the light of recent developments in the fields to which Bertilsson applies Peirce, but it is also due to recognition on her part that Peirce's relevance may extend to new areas of ..