[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]conversation of our days, and that is good enough. It may be sublime, because of what it inspires
within us and among us. There is nothing that makes one conversation intrinsically more rational
than another. Rationality is extrinsic: it is whatever we agree on. If there is less persistence among
fashionable literary theories than among fashionable chemical theories, that is a matter of sociology. It
is not a sign that chemistry has a better method, nor that it is nearer to the truth.
Thus pragmatism branches: there are Peirce and Putnam on the one hand, and James, Dewey and
Rorty on the other. Both are anti-realist, but in somewhat different ways. Peirce and Putnam
optimistically hope that there is something that sooner or later,
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Information and reasoning would finally result in. That, for them, is t he real and the true. It is
interesting for Peirce and Putnam both to define the real and to know what, within our scheme of
things, will pan out as real. This is not of much interest to the other sort of pragmatism. How to live
and talk is what matters, in those quarters. ' There is not only no external truth, but there are no
external or even evolving canons of rationality. Rorty's version of pragmatism is yet another language-
based philosophy, which regards all our life as a matter of conversation. Dewey rightly despised the
spectator theory of knowledge. What might he have thought of science as conversation? In my opinion,
the right track in Dewey is the attempt to destroy the conception of knowledge and reality as a matter
of thought and of representation. He should have turned the minds of philosophers to experimental
science, but instead his new followers praise talk.
Dewey distinguished his philosophy from that of earlier philosophical pragmatists by calling it
instrumentalism. This partly Indicated the way in which, in his opinion, things we make (including all
tools, including language as a tool) are instruments that intervene when we turn our experiences into
thoughts and deeds that serve our purposes. But soon `instrumentalism' came to denote a philosophy
of science. An instrumentalist, in the parlance of most modern philosophers, is a particular kind of
anti-realist about science one who holds that theories are tools or calculating devices for organizing
descriptions of phenomena, and for drawing inferences from past to future. Theories and laws have no
truth in themselves. They are only instruments, not to be understood as literal assertions. Terms that
seemingly denote invisible entities do not function as referential terms at all. Thus instrumentalism is
to he contrasted with van Fraassen's view, that theoretical expressions are to be taken literally but
not believed, merely `accepted' and used.
how do positivism and pragmatism differ?
The differences arise from the roots. Pragmatism is an Hegelian doctrine which puts all its faith in the
process of knowledge. Positivism results from the conception that seeing is believing. The p pragmatist
claims no quarrel with common sense: surely chairs and electrons are equally real, if indeed we shall
never again come to
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doubt their value to us. The positivist says electrons cannot be believed in, because they can never be
seen. So it goes through all the positivist litany. Where the positivist denies causation and explanation,
the pragmatist, at least in the Peircian tradition, gladly accepts them so long as they turn out to be
both useful and enduring for future inquirers.
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8 A surrogate for truth
`Mob psychology' that is how Imre Lakatos (1922 74) caricatured Kuhn's account of science. `Scientific
method (or "logic of discovery"), conceived as the discipline of rational appraisal of scientific theories
and of criteria of progress vanishes. We may of course still try to explain changes in " paradigms " in
terms of social psychology. This is . . . Kuhn's way' (I, p. 31).1 Lakatos utterly opposed what he
claimed to be Kuhn's reduction of the philosophy of science to sociology. He thought that it left no
place for the sacrosanct scientific values of truth, objectivity, rationality and reason.
Although this is a travesty of Kuhn the resulting ideas are important. The two current issues of
philosophy of science are epistemological (rationality) and metaphysical (truth and reality). Lakatos
seems to be talking about the former. Indeed he is universally held to present a new theory of method
and reason, and he is admired by some and criticized by others on that score. If that is what Lakatos
is up to, his theory of rationality is bizarre. It does not help us at all in deciding what it is reasonable
to believe or do now. It is entirely backward-looking. It can tell us what decisions in past science were
rational, but cannot help us with the future. In so far as Lakatos's essays bear on the future they are
a bustling blend of platitudes and prejudices. Yet the essays remain compelling. Hence I urge that
they are about something other than method and rationality. He is important precisely because he is
addressing, not an epistemological issue, but a metaphysical one. He is concerned with truth or its
absence. He thought science is our model of objectivity. We might try to explain that, by holding that
a scientific proposition must say how things are. It must correspond to the truth. That is what makes
science objective. Lakatos, educated in Hungary in an Hegelian and Marxist tradition, took for
granted the
((footnote:))
i All references to Imre Lakatos in this chapter are to his Philosophical Papers, 2 Volumes (J. Worrall and G. Currie, eds.), Cambridge, 1978.
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post-Kantian, Hegelian, demolition of correspondence theories. He was thus like Peirce, also formed in
an Hegelian matrix, and who, with other pragmatists, had no use for what William James called the
copy theory of truth.
At the beginning of the twentieth century philosophers in England and then in America denounced
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