2007-03-11

Pragmatism

Visited Blackwells in Tottenham Court Road yesterday, and came away with John Dewey's Experience and Nature, and a collection of writings by Charles Sanders Peirce. I'm intrigued by Pragmatism - it's got a reputation now as a wishy-washy relativist "it works for me" kind of philosophy, the sort of thing that people who don't like science think will save them from having to believe things they would rather not. But the big names (Dewey, Peirce and William James) were absolutely committed to science (although I think there is more than a little bit of "god of the gaps" thinking in James, trying to find a little corner where his faith could still live).

The naturalistic method, when it is consistently followed, destroys many things once cherished; but it destroys them by revealing their inconsistency with the nature of things - a flaw that always attended them and deprived them of efficacy for aught save emotional consolation. But its main purport is not destructive; empirical naturalism is rather a winnowing fan. Only chaff goes, though perhaps the chaff had once been treasured. An empirical method which remains true to nature does not "save"; it is not an insurance device nor a mechanical antiseptic. But it inspires the mind with courage and vitality to create new ideals and values in the face of the perplexities of a new world.
(Dewey, preface to Experience and Nature)

I found myself trying to explain this bit to a friend as we walked alongside a canal in Camden (from the same source, I was scribbling in the margins in the lift up to the platform at Caledonian Road tube station) :

The office of physical science is to discover those properties and relations of things in virtue of which they are capable of being used as instrumentalities; physical science makes claim to disclose not the inner nature of things but only those connections of things with one another that determine outcomes and hence can be used as means.

I must read Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy again, because I seem to recall him saying something similar.