Over at Habermasian Reflections Ali has some more interesting discussions of pragmatism. The issue he is addressing is in what sense Habermas is a pragmatist. However in doing this he ends up focusing in on a discussion of what pragmatism is. More particularly the different senses of pragmatism. An earlier post is quite interesting in that it discusses a book by Robert Brandom that considers pragmatism in quite broad terms and largely originating with Kant. The view is quite similar to my own. Of course as a broad sense of pragmatism it overlooks the important differences among pragmatists.
Pragmatism can be thought of narrowly: as a philosophical school of thought centered on evaluating beliefs by their tendency to promote success at the satisfaction of wants, whose paradigmatic practioners were the classical American triumvirate of Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. But pragmatism can also be thought of more broadly: as a movement centered on the primacy of the practical, initiated already by Kant, whose twentieth-century avatars includes not only Peirce, James and Dewey, but also the early Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein and such figures as Quine, Sellars, Davidson and Rorty. I think the broader version of pragmatism is much more important and interesting than the narrower one. (Robert Brandom, "Pragmatics and pragmatisms" in Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism, 41)
It is characteristic of pragmatism in the broad sense to see knowing how as having a certain kind of explanatory priority of knowing that. This is one influential form taken by an insistence on the explanatory primacy of the practical over the theoretical. Explicit theoretical beliefs can be made intelligible only against a background of implicit practical abilities. Pragmatism in this sense – call it ‘fundamental pragmatism’ – is opposed to the kind of Platonistic intellectualism that seeks to explain practical abilities in terms of some sort of grasp of principles; some sort of knowing that behind each bit of know how. (ibid, 46)
Wouldn't an easy criticism of this type of pragmatism be to say that our practical abilities are pre-determined by our theoretical paradigms? Pragmatism would then simply seem to be code for whatever particular set of desires our theoretical bearing instructs us to have.
I guess I wonder what is included under the phrase "primacy of the practical"--and exactly how such a thing would be determined without recourse to yet another theoretical paradigm. (For example, the theoretical idea that we should avoid all suffering, or stay alive as long as possible, make money, etc.) What, exactly, gives the pragmatic such primacy in the first place if not theory?
I should say that "primacy" can be interpreted in different ways. For instance Heidegger's distinction between present-at-hand and ready-at-hand is a good example of this.
The point a Heideggerian would make is that some of our theoretical "paradigms" are in fact a network of appropriate acts. For instance when I hammer with a hammer I don't have a set of propositions that give the hammer meaning. Rather the hammer is encountered in a world wherein there are other tools. So a hammer is encountered in a network with nails, boards, and so forth. It's meaning isn't as a some idea of a hammer but in terms of hammering nails into wood. Using a hammer is more fundamental in some senses than our descriptions of the hammer.
One problem a pragmatist might see in many discussions of "paradigms" (scare quotes so as to not tie ourselves to Kuhn) Paradigms are often discussed as if meaning were a web of theoretical entities. Present-at-hand entities rather than these practical senses. So even when people accept a kind of holism, there are important differences.
Consider for example Peirce. His pragamatic maxim (which in a way gets modern pragmatism going) is a kind of meaning maxim. It says that the meaning of any term is found in terms of how we go about determining when it is the case. So the meaning of "hard" is found in our attempts to measure it. But note how this ties meaning to practical actions. The practical is priviledged over the theoretical. I think that is true in science too. (One place where I think Kuhn goes astray)
The following is a good discussion of Peirce's maxim which I think gets to the heart of the theory/practice divide. "The Pragmatic Maxim"
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