Chapter 5

Of course, the chapter on pragmatism caught my eye and I read it very closely for Lynch's critiques of the system. He levels some basic charges at pragmatism including relativism, self-contradiction, the past depends on the future, and the aim of truth is different than the aim of justification (pragmatically). I'll try to deal with each as briefly as I can.

Lynch says that James' pragmatism (or classical pragmatism) is relativist in that the conceptions that we hold are beneficial to us individually. What Lynch confuses here, I believe, is the concept of truth-value (that's what I call it) and Truth. Truth (capital T) is what the universe is composed of, also called matter or nature (I don't think James would have a problem with this). For us, being only a very small part of the universe, obtaining Truth is monumental (if not impossible) task. When James talks about truth he is equating it with the feedback (truth-value) we get from the universe when we act based upon the beliefs that we maintain. The example that I always use to explain this is that if we maintain a belief that we can walk through walls, the truth-value of that belief is that we end up with a lot of bruises when we test the belief. If we don't modify that belief, it is detrimental to us (unless we happen to find the bruises useful in some fashion). Beliefs that have no truth-value, meaning that they don't change the way we act, are meaningless. When viewed in this way, all beliefs have a truth-value, that which occurs in the world when we act based on a belief. James applied this largely to questions that we have no answer for such as whether God, free will, etc. exists. The instrumentalist expands this view to the rest of the questions that we think we have (universal) answers for.

What Lynch would like to say is that if there is no independent method for determining what justifies beliefs, then the danger is radical relativism. How he does it is by ignoring a very important piece of James' pragmatism. That is that the reality in which we live contains other beings that not only share in the feedback that we experience (same type of, not the exact same) with which we can share (James would say that we are obligated to share) these beliefs to be critiqued and examined. These critiques either assist in justification or diminish the justification. And there is the independent method.

As for the past depending on the future, this was an argument that I could make no sense of. I can tell you that James would say that there is a reality in which time passes and that time before now is fixed. In essence, once events have occurred there is no way to change them. The only malleable thing in this equation is our reflection upon those events and the beliefs that we maintain about them. What Lynch is trying to say is that there is some connection between what is real and what is true. I don't think James would say that he has a problem with that insofar as we don't claim that we can get unrestricted access to either. To assert that pragmatism maintains some implication on the past that changes it based upon our current conceptions is a step far afield from what James believed.

For Lynch on Rorty, we would not aim at justification if Truth wasn't what we are after. Rorty says that when we go about looking for Truth, justification is all we get. Therefore, there is no difference and it is really justification that we are seeking. The difference here is that Lynch still ideally wants to believe that his ideas are true and that we (universally) want to believe that our ideas are true. The pragmatist rejects this (and thusly, proves the universality of the claim as false). The pragmatist doesn't ultimately care about what is true because of the questionable nature of such assertions being applied to statements. The pragmatist cares about resolving the problems that we face right now in the context of right now (who we are, what we "know", where we've been, and where we are looking to be).

I hope that's a good summarization and compelling argument against what Lynch is claiming as faults in pragmatism. It seems to me to be a failure of an idealist approach to appreciate a realistic one. Lynch appears to maintain that there is truth out there (and I don't think many pragmatists would disagree) and that we should be continuing the struggle to obtain it (whereas pragmatists look to place value in concepts where it could be more effective).