 Hey everybody welcome to episode number five of Patterson in Pursuit my goodness This is a fantastic episode. I'm talking with dr. John Stewart Who is the distinguished professor of philosophy at Emory University in Atlanta, and we are talking about American pragmatism if you don't know anything about American pragmatism, don't worry It's a philosophical tradition that's been around for over a century And we start the interview talking about the very basics and then we go into more and more complexity There are several awesome features of this interview Not least of which is that my own philosophy is just about the opposite of American pragmatism and two I don't know that much about American pragmatism from what I have read I strongly disagree with a lot of the central claims, but that makes for fantastic conversation Things get a little heated. You'll hear about 30 minutes in or so. We're doing well. We're on the same page There's not a lot of tension I'm learning a lot and then I keep asking questions and trying to learn and things got a little bit of tense It might have been partly due to my own framework that I was bringing to the table My own analytical framework was very hard for me to get around, but it just turned into a fantastic conversation I'm so grateful that dr. Stewart took over an hour to talk with me to try to get these ideas through my head I'm certain that if you guys enjoy philosophical conversations, you're going to get a lot from this interview So make sure you listen from beginning to end because as we go along, there's just so many good nuggets of information here In fact, what I'm going to do is the next episode episode number six I'm going to do a breakdown episode where I'm going to talk about the interviews that I've done so far And I'm going to give you kind of my own analysis and take on them And I'm going to spend a lot of time specifically on this interview because there's so much to unpack So I really hope you enjoy my conversation with dr. John Stewart of Emory University. He's written several books on this topic He is a legitimate expert when it comes to American Pragmatism and as you listen if you have some comments here you'd like to add Please find my YouTube channel leave a comment there or send me an email because I'm trying to learn about this philosophy I think it's very important in terms of the history of ideas And I'd love to talk to people that are knowledge more knowledgeable than I am on this subject. All right. Enjoy the interview Thank you very much dr. Stewart for sitting down and speaking with me today. You're welcome It's nice to do a lot of your work focuses on pragmatism, which is a philosophy. I'm very interested in can you give just a brief Summarization in a couple of paragraphs. What is the philosophy of pragmatism? Sure. Well, that's a little bit Yes, I can and of course, that's you know It's always a risky thing to reduce an entire philosophy to a sound bite of 25 words or less Right and so I think that it is worth stressing one of the things that your question says which is that it is an entire philosophy And so pragmatism is not simply an epistemology Some people know pragmatism through epistemology and through a theory of truth But pragmatism is a much broader philosophy. So I would say that pragmatism, right? And so how would one characterize any ism, right? And so you could think about these are the doctrines that one must believe to be a pragmatist These are the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a pragmatist a More pragmatic way of answering that question would be to talk about the temperament of pragmatism when James talks about the temperament And that people choose and hold philosophies because of their temperament or vision. So pragmatism is a clearly empirically oriented philosophy. It is pluralistic it is fallibilistic and I guess the the key point here for pragmatism is that it tends to Reverse the traditional priority of theory and practice and take practical matters to be crucial All right, and so it both wants to evaluate beliefs in terms of their practical consequences But more generally it wants to evaluate theory in terms of practical consequences. That's wonderful So let's dive into that a little bit So the theory of or the the philosophy of pragmatism has multiple parts You can kind of say it has an epistemological component. Does it have a metaphysical component? Is there a sure? Yeah, it has a metaphysical component and I think that The core of Pragmatism is actually the moral component the ethical component Pragmatists tend to view epistemology as a subset of ethics Philosophers like person James view the true in the words of William James. The true is the good with respect to knowledge And so the broader category is the good and truth is just one kind of good It's the epistemological knowledge kind of good, right? And so I think that it does have a metaphysics, but the the real sort of Beating core of pragmatism is kind of an ethical stance that is fascinating So how would the pragmatist respond to the kind of intuitive? Question or the intuitive idea that there is such a thing as truth out there that is kind of an objective Metaphysical truth and there are epistemologically truth and true and false things that you can say What is the pragmatist said that the questions of objective truth are Secondary to the pragmatic Consequences right so one good Slightly sloganistic, but one one good way to sort of understand a pragmatist position on most any issue Come to this one is to take whatever the traditional philosophers dualism is and just to deny it, right? And so is truth subjective? No, it's truth objective No, neither one of those right and so in you said in response to the question about sort of truth is just out There an objective the pragmatist for the most part and there are debates within pragmatism like any theory There are multiple positions within it But in in the work of many of the best-known pragmatist people like William James and John Dewey later people like Richard Rorty Truth is not out there waiting to be discovered that metaphor of discovering an already existing truth Makes no sense for them. Truth is something that's made rather than discovered Truth for pragmatists is a property of belief The things aren't true or false. We sometimes talk that way. We say like you're my true friend But what we really mean is like you're really my friend or you're a good friend or something like that The only things that are true or false are beliefs and there's no beliefs independent of believers And so there is no non human connected truth truth is just a property of belief And does that apply to what we consider to be the external world? So would you agree with the sentence like without a mind or without believers there would be no such thing as truth Does that imply that there is no External world as we can see that that all there is is just fine, right? So again, that's a kind of traditional dualism of if there's no external is there then only internal and again The pragmatist view is no both of those languages of the external and the internal are mistaken. So it's not if it's one It's not the other Some philosophers think that reality is objective and independent of minds some think that Reality is somehow mind-dependent The pragmatist view is that both of those are wrong, right? And so a lot of the traditional views in philosophy that philosophy students in introductory courses are taught as Being opposite of one another There's empiricism and rationalism. There's Plato and Aristotle. There's objectivism and subjectivism For most pragmatists those are not very interesting Intramural debates that actually our debates because I call them intramural because they're debates between two positions that have a lot in common We tend to classify philosophies by their answers, right? What do they say a Kind of standard pragmatic way of approaching that is say let's classify philosophies by their problems What do they ask and so in separating the external and the internal and having some people pick the other External and some people pick the internal those people agree on the way that the the issue is phrased right and so for pragmatists thinking about an external reality or a Reality creating independent mind makes no sense One of the things that William James points out in principles of psychology is that There is no object There is nothing except as it presents itself to someone, right? And so there is no independent reality But at the same time there is no internal mental state There is no state of consciousness except as of something else Okay, and so there's no way to disassociate the in and the out the self and the object these things are Integrally irreducibly reciprocally linked, okay, so would you agree with? Something like this if I were to try to rephrase this and say Two people who are making what appeared to be mutually exclusive claims We're talking about you know the pencil that's on or the pen that's on the table I say something about it you say something about it really we're not talking about the same Objective thing we're just kind of reporting on our own internal experience that may or may not have similarities to it No, no, we really are talking about the same thing or or at least it's quite possible I mean with further inquiry a good turn out that we're not talking about the same thing But with an example like that the odds are good that what you're talking about when you refer to the pen on the table Is the same thing that I have in mind when I talk about the pen on the table If you claim that the pen is x whatever x is and I claim that it's not x We're probably saying incompatible things Okay, we would then need some sort of right and so because pragmatist trust that truth is a Result it's a consequence of inquiry. It's not something that starts at the beginning We would need to conduct some sort of experiment to see which one of us is true, right? We have to inquire further so if so So intuitively I would think if so we disagree about some some Something in the world sure and let's say that you know, I say it's blue and you say it's red does Doesn't that imply then that there is such a thing as an external reality that we are evaluating and saying There is something that has these particular properties That if you evaluate it differently than mine your evaluation might be wrong and my mind might be right so No, the answer is no to that there's no way right in other words You could take this as sort of a pragmatic challenge and you could understand it as Tell me about anything as it is independent of you're telling it You know it's kind of good luck with that one right because the minute that you begin to describe it You are using your experience. You're presenting it from your point of view if that's the case Couldn't we say then that mutually exclusive claims could be compatible and the sense that I'm just telling you about my experience as I'm having it It could be if that's if that's what you're doing right if you which is right So there's a bunch of analytical philosophers in early 20th century who want to say things like I'm being appeared to Orangely right inside. Okay, if you if what you're really doing is not if you're talking in a kind of clunky way Not about the pen but to report something about your internal States of mind Sure, that might be true too, right? So the most one of the most famous Examples in all of pragmatism is the one that William James uses At the beginning of his book pragmatism and he talks about coming up on he's out in the woods And he comes up on a camping party that I don't know whether you know this and they're They're involved in a heated philosophical argument and the argument is about whether a Man on the ground one of them as he walks is walking around a squirrel or not Yes, I have and so the squirrel is on a tree and as the man moves the squirrel moves so that it's always on the other side of The tree right and so some people are arguing yes and other people arguing no and what James does is to say it Which is the standard pragmatic move which is essentially to say like before we can evaluate the truth or falsity of any claim We have to know the meaning of what we're talking about Right, so if you mean passing from the north to the east to the south to the west of the squirrel Yes, he goes around if you mean passing from in front of the squirrel to the squirrel side to the squirrel's back No, he doesn't right now in that case then James reports people are very unhappy with him because he settled their argument And they were having great fun yelling with each other right So James tells that story in part right and people read that and I think oh, that's kind of a clever slightly outdated little story Right, but he tells that story as a way of sort of suggesting that all kinds of traditional problems in philosophy are like that They're the result of not being clear about what we mean and then if we clear up the meaning the problem is dissolved Right that doesn't mean that every problem is to solve right somebody could say like no no when I say going around I also mean passing from north to east to south to west And I could say I don't think he's doing that and you could say I think he is right and then James would say well Then what would we do? We would bring in other inquires. We would get a few compasses Right and it may well turn out that you're just wrong right in others But being wrong isn't being wrong independent of experience. It's being wrong as experience shows okay, rightness and wrongness are themselves experiential, okay, so how would we take? How would the pragmatist view a circumstance like this? Let's say I'm making a claim not about The objective world. I'm making a specific claim about your internal experience, right? So I'm saying Dr. John Stewart is having the positive experience of Jumping off a cliff right now, right? Would this be something that that you could say confidently if that is clearly Communicated this is certainly false. Yeah, so again. I want to just go back You said let's not talk about an objective and I want to just stress for pragmatist There's not objective or subjective. Okay, if you use either of those language You're just sort of confused from the beginning. Okay, right? But if you want to switch from talking about the pen on the table to talking about sort of the experience that I'm having Whether jumping off a cliff or something else. Yes, the pragmatist thinks just like anything else I could be right about that or I could be wrong about that and whether I am would depend upon what the Consequences show Right and so again, the the pragmatist thinks James has truth as a matter of consequences, right? And so if I if I believe that Drinking a glass of juice will refresh me We only know really for sure after I drink the glass of juice and we see what happens, right? and I Could be wrong about that and so in the language slightly professional slightly Are you that language of philosophers? I don't have any privileged access to my mental states. I could be wrong about that You don't have privilege access to your own mental states. Correct, right? I could be I could be mistaken about that, right? I don't have any in principle access, right? And so in the same way that you might have a better view of the pen than I do Right, you might know something more, right? And so another way to look at that is pragmatist. Don't think that we come Transparent to ourselves. There's things about myself. I could be wrong about all that's fascinating. So so let's let's explore that a little bit is that true in all facets of your own kind of experience even just basic conscious awareness the possibility of being wrong is yeah, but not Actually being wrong, right? We're often right. Otherwise be a really bad day, but but the possibility that that yes Even something like okay, so what about a circumstance? Let's say that you are listening to music That you're having that right you're aware of listening to music Would you say then that there is still a possibility even though you are having the conscious experience of Listening to music that you aren't sure Right and so let me pick an even sort of maybe better one because it doesn't involve the outside music thing Right somebody could say I feel jealous. How could I be wrong about that? I just feel jealous. I'm just sitting here feeling jealous. It's bad day. I feel jealous, right? And the pragmatist think like what is it? What is it that you're asserting, right? Well, if you're christening right in other words like so imagine you're born and your parents say I will call you Steven right and it's like you can't be wrong about that because you're just naming something for the first time Okay, right and so if all you're doing is sort of saying like It's going on right I'm gonna call up this Right, but if you say when you claim that you're jealous if you're claiming that your experience is relevantly like other Experiences that have been called jealous. You might be wrong Right, which is why somebody could talk with you for a while and say, you know what now that we've talked a bit I don't actually think that you are jealous. I think that you are envious and you might and you might say like Wow, you're right. That is what's going on so you'd say then unless you are merely naming a Novel experience that you're having you can't know whether or not that correlates to Other experiences that you've had or or this package of things that we call jealousness, right? You can't know if you describe it what you're doing is essentially saying It's relevantly like these other things that have been described this way right and that may or may not be the case Right just if it's even if it's internal, so if I say but it's not internal. Oh, right It's not in other words. There's things going on in you, but there's things going on in the world as well so let's say that there is this experience that I have had of Being aware of what I call blue sure and I would say I have I At least believe I have the memory of seeing this my whole life Is that something that I can't be certain of or could it well again on the pragmatist view if we're talking about Experiences opposed to a formal system. You can be certain about two plus two equals four You can be certain about certain logical relations You can't be certain about anything in experience. Okay, right, which is why I said at the beginning that they're fallible So I think it's always possible that you're mistaken. You don't ever have the complete story, right, but so Is that possible? It's not really a very interesting question, but yes, it yes it is possible Right what you're doing is saying like through my whole life. That's a kind of way of saying like look I have a lot of evidence for this Right, and so okay You have a lot of evidence for that. Is it possible that you would be wrong? Yes, right? Just like you could be wrong about anything else you could be wrong about a perception You could say is it possible that I'm wrong that that's a pen. I just put it down Is it possible that somebody really fast replaced it with a hologram of a pen? Yes, that's possible. Is there much evidence for that? No, but right so the the the notion of True or false and pragmatism is largely replaced by what I think is the much more sort of common-sense notion of more or less warranted Right and so a laboratory scientist in a way isn't claiming this is true What they're saying is we have a lot of evidence for this right or on the basis of my experiment Let's see if you can reproduce it. These are the results I'm getting this is a wonderful segue into the next thing that I wanted to talk about you gave a little caveat you said you can be certain about certain logical relations between things can we talk a bit about the role of logic or the analysis of logic in pragmatism, so If I were to say something like you know, there are no married bachelors out there in existence is This is something that even the pragmatist would say well, certainly that is true But it's just kind of a linguistic thing that you're that you're stating You're just defining one of your right linguistic or we could say conceptualate, right? It's sort of we could say philosophy sometimes say true by definition, right? It's just sort of a formal system. You're essentially saying it's your what you're essentially doing is we're saying X equals X Right, and if you're gonna call right, yeah, and you're at or two plus two equals four, right? And if somebody says I don't think so We don't take them out for more experience What we do is ask them like do you understand the concept of two and you get what equal means, right? And and these things are true within that system. Okay, right? so would you say Okay, what is the Opinion of the let's say the law of non-contradiction and pragmatism, so is there any way At least when we're talking about purely logical things the pragmatist would say Just can't you've made kind of a it's conceptually incoherent to say that you could have a married bachelor You don't understand the meaning of the terms involved. There is no such thing But is that a kind of a principle at large is there as couldn't because the pragmatist take a stance about in in the world there could not be such things as Logical contradictions or paradoxes can't exist for the same reason that they're not even coherent things Yes, although the last thing you said makes me what gives me pause a second Yes, there is a difference between truths that are true as a result of logical relations and truths that are so because of existential relations and so Pragmatists are wary of folks who think that in having proven something at the conceptual level. They've proven something at the real level there can be paradoxes if what you mean by that is sort of a parent evidence on both sides of something but That paradox For pregnancy in terms of experiential matter is experiential rather than logical and so what that means is we need more inquiry Right and so purse thinks the the remedy for the shortcomings of inquiry is more inquiry We need to find out it looks at how could this be both of these things or neither of them, right? But upon finding out more. Yeah, would be Would the intuition would certainly be we need more inquiry to try to see what's going on here Is there an entertaining of the idea that maybe Both of these things are true at the same time like Eastern mysticism comes to mind. There's a lot. There's a large group that say reality itself is experientially contradictory that you can you can there's this you this metaphysical unity of opposites There's blackness and whiteness together at the same time in the same way And if that's a logical contradiction, so be it I felt it right. What would you say something? Well, so Yeah, there's a couple things there If we're talking about experience or Existing things the pragmatists say the language of contradiction doesn't apply there Things aren't contradictions of the others. They're not opposites. They're just different The log and the pile of ashes are not opposites. They're just different things the one became the other after it was burned right So that to import the epistemology language of contradiction and opposite into existential matters is a kind of category confusion One thing is not the opposite of the other. It's just different from the other. It's not the illogical opposite of the other It's just different from one another right and so You know Walt Whitman the poet Proto pragmatist famously says, you know, do I contradict myself? You know fine. I'm large. I contain contradictions but but what he means by that is Something temporal so in your example, you're saying can something be X and not X in the same respect at the same time Right and the pragmatist would say like there's no evidence that there that that could be You know show me something give me some evidence. No, but can Right can something over time become something else? Yes, of course so this notion that experience is Contradictory has little resonance with the pragmatist the notion that experience is big Contains varieties Contains wide differences Develops over time. That's what pragmatism is about So even even something like an extreme let's say in in Hinduism There's this idea of the unity of everything It's kind of a unity of everything and a denial of everything at the same time. It's it's that this is true in Hinduism It's it's very explicitly true in Buddhism where they say the only thing that's real is nothing is nothingness. Yeah Does that strike you as because I think that what the phrase you used a minute ago was we don't have any evidence of that Is that something that is open to evidence or is that like how we're defining Mary bachelors? It just simply just can't be that way, right? So we'd have to ask you, right? I mean we would sort of say which did you mean, right? And if you're saying all I met was I'm just sort of manipulating symbols within a kind of closed formal system That's what you meant. It's not a matter of experience Which again is why in math classes people who don't understand something are not told to go outside and gather up sets of two and sets of two Right. They're they're told in fact to sort of this is not an empirical matter We need to think conceptually here, right If someone's making a claim about the nature of experience the pragmatists think then what we're looking for is evidence in experience, right? if someone says The only thing that is is nothing Right, the the standard pragmatist move just like with the squirrel example is to ask. What does that mean? Yeah, right in other words What would have to happen in experience to show that that's so Right, and then you go out and look and see whether that's so or not Okay, right and so One could say I don't really have any idea what you mean when you say the only thing that's real is nothing Or the the being is nothing, right? So tell me what that means Right in the same way that somebody could say I I don't know in chemistry lab what you're talking about when you talk about an acid What what tell me what that is, right? And so somebody said, what do you mean by nothing, right? And if the response is well, I can't say that right I can't tell you Yeah, then the pragmatist view is well, then there's no that right then. I mean then it can't be said, right and Primitives all think that At least almost all think anyway qualified that way that experience outstrips language in in the language of james But if you can't describe something then the idea of finding evidence for it makes no sense at all Right, it's like I've been like my saying like there is a huge invisible pink elephant in this room Um, what do I mean by saying it's invisible and pink? I can't tell you but check it out and see whether it's so What would you do to look for it? There's nothing that you could do right and so In varieties of religious experience James does something which I think is quite essentially pragmatic and also very helpful in that he essentially says this is my This is the 25 words or less short paraphrase, right? But what he essentially does is to say To religious believers and non-believers of all stripes on all continents He says if you report honestly That you have a certain kind of experience And if you are even the least bit literate and able to describe that experience I will believe that it went on right. I'm having this kind of experience Whether or not that experience gives rise to a belief that it's true is an entirely separate matter I see right and so in the same way without sort of going in a kind of cosmic mystical way somebody could say Uh, you know as they're playing basketball Uh, I could say, uh, wow, uh that guy elbowed me. I um I have a dislocated rib, right and that is a claim which which later inquiry could show to be true or false Right, it could turn out. No, your rib wasn't dislocated. You're just bruised. But if somebody says I'm having this painful experience James thinks sure, right, which is why this book is called varieties of religious experience. If all you're doing is describing your experience Then sure if you're again, if you're the least bit able at describing We'll believe that this is going on, right? Maybe you're lying to me Maybe you're manipulating me but setting inside those cases if you're describing and saying my life is like this James thinks sure then my philosophy has to find space for your life But if you think that your experience comes prepackaged with beliefs that are automatically true James thinks there isn't anything like that in that example though, doesn't that kind of presuppose this distinction between Um, the subjective and the objective that you can report your internal experience and we'll accept that No, because there's nothing internal right in other words. What you're saying is this is going on And and I said to go back back to another example somebody could say no, that's not what's going on So does the pragmatist say then that the commonplace claims that we make about Existing things in the world that of my rib hurts or this is over there that is there are actually There's a premise. There's a mistaken linguistic premise in there that they people think they're talking about The an objective world, but in reality all they're doing unbeknownst to them is reporting on their experiences Well, you sort of say all they're doing is reporting on their experiences No, they're reporting about things in the world, right? And then the question becomes see you're still talking in terms of these external Internal dichotomies objective subjective almost all of the questions that you've asked to have those questions And the pragmatist saying those are all wrong. I'm trying to give you a different example You come out of a movie And and suppose you say Wow, that was really scary Yeah, right. You're not saying i'm scared. You're saying the movie that is a scary movie Right. What if your three friends say Movie was not the least bit scary. You're just easily scared. You were scared. Yeah, right The pragmatist think both of those are ways of trying to describe the same kind of experience One is locating the quality of that experience subjectively. The other is locating it objectively Whether or not we do that depends upon our pragmatic purposes. Okay, so what would you how would you respond to something like this? So what I would say is in that circumstance The statement that movie is scary as a statement about the movie is is a confusion about language that you write because And that sounds like sort of a traditional analytical view, right? Because you sort of think tertiary qualities don't belong to the thing, right? Right. And again, the pragmatist right in the pragmatist view is like that's completely wrong Those are aspects of experience I found the movie to be scary in the same way that I found it to last two hours and a half But isn't that a different sentence to say I found the movie to be scary versus the movie was had this particular dimension on the wall The movie is scary The movie doesn't have that particular dimension on the wall It has that particular dimension on the wall as observed by us to me to some group of observers Well, so it sounds In my intuition is just to think that it sounds like there is a an intentional almost conflation to say that we can say Sentences like the movie is scary very meaningfully I mean, that's how we say that the movie is scary But when we really want to be analytical and we want to say well, what is it? What do you actually mean by that? Then the response is well Clearly I can say this in a meaningful way therefore I can I can get away with it Whereas somebody my intuition would be something like oh, well you that's an that's an imprecise way of communicating If you think that you're making a claim about the movie versus reporting on your own experiences Yeah, so I think the pragmatist view again There could be examples of people lying or manipulating but if we set those aside for a second If you claim the movie is scary, you're describing an experience And that experience has both a subjective and objective pole But what if I'm intentionally not trying to do that? So what what if I'm trying to say there is what if somebody is intentionally trying to describe something separate of their experience? They can't do it. It's impossible. So it is a confusion. So if somebody So I guess that maybe I didn't phrase this accurately before So what the pragmatist says is the appearance of Evaluating objective things and having some kind of some there's something out there that we can report on is It has contains a mistaken premise that all you can do is simply report on your experiences. Uh, no Again, that's wrong because you're saying simply report Okay, and so you're not reporting on your experiences. You're reporting on things in the world You're reporting on nature But the only When we say the term things in the world, it doesn't mean what like an analytic philosopher would think or yeah Well, I'm not I'm not sure we'd have to talk me in analytical philosophy is a name almost incoherent term But right, so it means what later vikinstein means. Okay. It means what jail austin means Right is rorydian analytical philosopher at one point in his life. Probably it means what some of them mean Right, but things are not objective or subjective. That's a complete confusion So that's the that's the mistaken cruise. So when I'm like my just my personal and default mindset is to think that There are things but but the yeah, there are things Right, the prime minister think there are things too. But what we mean by things is Reporting on experience. Is it not as I know because what you're saying is reporting on something subjective The opposite here prime ministers are not saying no to objectivity so that they can affirm subjectivity They're saying no to the subject of object dualism Okay, either way either of those ways of speaking is equally wrong They're wrong in different ways, but they're wrong in the same way in that they stem from starting out with a central confusion So But so it sounds it sounds like and and this is I love this This is excellent because this is this is kind of getting to the meat of what I when I'm trying to grasp here It seems like the pragmatist would say that on the one hand My mindset for thinking about the world contains this mistaken premise of this There is this thing as the subjective and the objective But on the other hand, it also sounds like you're saying well, no, but those are both valid as well Yeah, so again, the only thing that are valid are arguments things are not valid, right? That's As analytical philosophy. That's a confusion. Yeah. Yeah, that was right So so but I mean the terms are important here, right? And I think that it's probably It'd probably be helpful to not sort of think like what does this strange person call the pragmatist think The pragmatist think that what they're doing is speaking a kind of common sense, right? Right, and they're thinking philosophers who have been twisted around by a bunch of confusions often put these things in very odd ways Right. And so the the pragmatist thinks When you make this description, you're sort of saying this is what I found to be going on You probably unless you're You know a super all the time introspective guy, you probably think you're talking about other stuff You're talking about things like pens and cliffs and so on movies, right? And and Are your claims about those things? Yes, right? As as Dewey says we don't have experience of experience. We have experience of nature Right. Those two things are always joined Right. Um, Dewey tells he's not a very funny writer, but he tells the story of sort of the history of philosophy as Having shattered things into parts and then working to put them back together again He sort of says that most of philosophy is a Humpty Dumpty project Right. And so the question is why would you shatter them into parts like that to begin with? It's fine to say the movie is scary It's fine to say that it's scared if you come out in real life If you come out and say the movie is scary and all of your friends, right and everybody on rotten tomatoes and so on says Uh, this was a childish Slightly boring movie people are going to tell you the movie wasn't scary. You were just scared I just hate right and if everybody else comes out horrified here on end. They're going to say like that is a really scary movie Okay Whether it's useful to put that description on the subjective pole or the objective pole depends upon our purposes Right and the pragmatic view here is that when we make a distinction What philosophers often do is cover up the reasons why they're making the distinction All right. So one of the things we do with words, right is we Distinguish things. All right and the question becomes for what purpose All right. Why are you doing it this way rather than some other way? So what do you think about so this is uh, this is such an interesting way of thinking about things And it's interesting as well that this is labeled pragmatism because my my default intuition I'm sure is shared by some people certainly not all people that this is almost a less pragmatic and in the in the colloquial sense of the term less pragmatic way of Going about things to deny that there is this distinction between the subjective and the object because that seems very Let me just but it's not to deny the distinction Right. It's to deny the existential dualism. There are not subjects and objects. These have a They have no independent existence. They are Distinctions that we make right and so so yeah, and so do we at one point Soda says like this would be a good slogan for pragmatism dualisms. No distinctions. Yes dualisms. No distinctions. Yes But so the so the question is so the question that you ask about a distinction is not is it real or not? But you ask what use does it serve exactly? What is the what is the what's the purpose for it? But I still return to my earlier question Which doesn't that seem like a less pragmatic way of doing things because do you do you agree at least that the Intuition is to think That the words that we're using Have this relationship to the objective in contrast and this dualistic contrast to the subjective Yeah, I don't think most people have that intuition. We don't think so. No I think that a whole way of speaking is a heavily philosophy way That most people don't have when you tell them like don't right if what they mean is right if all you mean is We usually encounter things that seem to be independent of us in many ways the prime to say obviously that's true experience shows that to be the case Right experience shows that the pen doesn't go out of existence when I look away Right, we keep several cameras trained on it. I look away. It's still there, right? but it Anything like that any kind of example like that doesn't show that the thing is somehow independent of experience because in fact You're saying it's these other experiences other people looking cameras being trained on it that show it just by virtue of the fact That people are even describing it. Yeah reporting. Yeah, this is something that is experienced Yeah, right and so I think that what we grapple with from science down to ordinary life is Um, right. So why are scientists concerned with the repeatability of an experiment right with getting the same result? Because it's not because they're having fun doing the experiment necessarily It's because we don't want to claim that the resulting Beliefs are true unless the consequences show that they're repeatable that they're found across experience isn't there a premise in science And in any kind of empirical endeavor, isn't there kind of a preset position that there is this external thing that we're measuring Rather than just simply reporting on experiences that we're having So again, it's really interesting how you put that rather than merely reporting on experiences that we're having It's not merely and it's not that we're having right. The experience is no more mine than the objects Right when I see a telephone pole. It's not my experience It's the experience of me plus telephone pole. It's not my experience. That's That whole way of putting it is is fraught with all kinds of philosophical assumptions. So so let me ask you this That's a very interesting point. I've never thought of that. Would you say that the Intuition of the existence of a kind of self Given the fact that this is a word the self that you're just a label All that there is is just the experience even thinking that there is my experience or your experience is already Presupposing this dualism No, I don't no, I don't think that that's right. I mean the pragmatists have a view of the self Okay, and so Dewey says for example that the self Doesn't have it's not a separate substantial thing. It doesn't have a history. It is a history It's a series of events. Is it independent from any other series of events? Sure But is there Experience experience shows that it is right in other words. It's why we say that that was your childhood rather than mine Right, it's because that set of experiences stands in a certain relation to your being here talking now That my being here talking now doesn't have to it but but isn't that Doesn't that presuppose then that there is this thing that is kind of the external world in which there are two different Chains of experience operating Uh, if it depends what you mean by external, right? So again the premise is always going to say You need to define your terms before I can tell you if what you're saying is true or false So if you mean by external Something that experience shows doesn't depend upon my existence in certain ways. Of course, that's so well Well, isn't that and isn't that a metaphysical dualism to say that there are there is a chain of events That is separate from another chain of event like experiences. No, right? It would be like saying how many things are there in this room Is it I suppose I so I'm gone way past dualism. I'll say there's 17 Right, or there's three, right? How many kinds of things are there, right? And the premise view is that is a question about how is it helpful to make certain distinctions rather than others Right, I could walk into a class and say how many kinds of students are there in here One answer could be two there's male and female the other answer could be four There's freshman sophomore, right? Somebody could say there's actually six people who are six feet tall six feet one six feet two Isn't that cleared up by just precise language? So yeah, it's exactly right Which is so that this whole language of external objective subjective merely experience That will be cleared up according to the pregnancy if we if we're more careful about it So my just in the way I'm trying to understand this it seems like there is almost a Like a solipsistic flavor to this in the sense that it's the opposite of that Right, it's it's an outside of the self. It's other things, right? You're you're not the the pragmatists don't take that seriously as a philosophical problem But I thought you just said that there was there were no Other things in other words, it's what you mean by other, right? There's there's clearly other things than me my experience shows that the world is full of all kinds of things that are not me Yes, but that's just a Statement about your experience, right? So it's not just a statement about the experience. It's a statement about the world See if you keep saying that and you don't grasp everything does not it's a statement about the world There are in the world many things That's what I think most people would common sense would believe most people I think are common sense realists The world has many many things in it. There's a tree. There's a stoplight. There's a road. There's me. There's you There's my friend. All of these are different things But but if we're if we're speaking precisely using the pragmatist language, what that you speak just like that Just like I did that there's all these things So right the pragmatists are pluralists the world is full of all kinds of things So if if we were to try to knowingly put that in a in a more analytic Um way Are you saying so so we say the world is full of things from the pragmatist like that sentence and from the pragmatist standpoint Is I'm reporting on my experience that the world is full of no, you're not reporting on your experience You're reporting that this is how the world is found to be by everyone who checks it out But do you see what i'm trying to get at with the it seems like there's some Or when I'm not understanding this is what it is. I'm not I'm able to understand the the Nonsolipsistic version of that if if all you like you right the solipsism would be true If what you thought you were doing was reporting the contents of your own consciousness That's where earlier empiricists like hum are led to okay And what so what's the distinction between that so it's why William james writes this famous book called radical empiricism To separate himself from other kinds of empiricism, right? And so pragmatists do not think that what they're doing is reporting their own conscious states They don't think that they are somehow Receiving simply their own impress that i'm receiving my impressions. You're receiving yours and we then lack a common world Right, that's not what they think they think experience shows are living in the world shows That we have in mind the same pen That when you talk about a pen and I talk about a pen we're talking about the same thing Right now it could turn out to be different I could say go get the pen and you could walk across the room and I would think like what's going on here, right? But in general, we don't find ourselves in separate worlds Right not fully separate worlds. So There's nothing solipsistic about at all I mean, I think pragmatism is the least solipsistic philosophy probably of all time Just based on our experiences, which just doesn't seem to be the case right because because the pragmatist thing Experience doesn't provide any evidence of solipsism, right? Right Again solipsism is not just the view that there's something going on For me that you don't know about it's that it's inaccessible to you that we're both caught forever in our own little worlds that are not common The pragmatist might think there's something going on about you that I don't know but we can talk about it Right, just like I could say how many pairs of white gym socks do I have in my closet? You don't know but it doesn't mean that they're inaccessible. It just means you haven't checked it out yet But what are you referencing when you are referencing me? You're just referencing experience, right? Again, I'm just referencing experience. No, I'm referencing you What is that? What what are you? Yeah, okay. Well, so again, we could define you in a bunch of ways, right? We could go to the chemist and say what is you and we could get once you're sort of this combination of these chemicals in this Right, we could go to the historian and say you're this person who was born here and then went to school there and lived here and Right, we could do that. We could sort of do this in sort of a genetic way You're the person who has the following strands of DNA, right? We could define you politically, right? We could say you're the person who's for this candidate, right? And so there's not one question that we're asked, right? Which is why if somebody says to you, who are you? The context matters, right? Sometimes the answer is I'm so-and-so's son Sometimes it's like I'm the person who works for this So in the in the context that we find ourselves in right now, would you agree with something like this? This is all from your perspective that what I am Is a young guy that's that's you're just having an experience that you're having a conversation Yeah, sure, right Which right which seems like I think what outside of philosophy class most people would say right? We're sitting down at the coffee shop and there's somebody I'm talking to right and it's like is this person You know this person is other than me. Can we talk about the same things? Yes frequently So but you don't have the belief based on your own experience is that when I leave the room I'm going to just I'm just I can disappear. I'm just a phantom out there that I'm some kind of Being right as some kind of person, right? I think that I think that If people have that view, right? There's something sort of terribly wrong with them because there is a huge amount Of empirical data to suggest that doesn't happen, right? If my view is that I'm talking with people in the minute that they leave the room they become phantoms and vanish Right that could be true. It would be empirically possible that that's true It's just that there's no evidence to support that and there's a lot of evidence on the other side right, so Yes, the pregnancy would entertain that as a possibility But it's very very highly not warranted Okay, so let me ask you if I may just a couple of questions as we as we wrap up here So my own um philosophy as I'm sure you've gathered based on my loose language is kind of the exact opposite like Even in the way I'm phrasing questions. It's like this this rationalism. I'm saying merely and just and I'm I'm uh Uh poo pooing perhaps some of the right thing just in that language So from the rationalist approached Or at least from my own What I would say is um, it makes sense to assume that there is like the world makes sense when I think of it as There is this external thing separate of of me and I believe that that's the I can't know that it's the case But I believe it's the case just on my experience. I'm developing a theory to best explain The phenomena that I'm experiencing that there is this three-dimensional place and it's inhabited by little Right and of course if it's phenomena that you're experiencing that it's not separate from you Well, but so what I would say is my the I'll bet that's exactly where I wanted to go with this But that's a better way of putting it My I find it very compelling and explanatory to think That there is something outside of my Experience that there is that separateness that that seems to satisfactorily explain Like if I were to try to make predictions based on that and understand it And try to understand the world that way that that would be very Uh, a plausible way of a very reasonable way of going about things, but you think that's mistaken Well, it's again, it depends what you mean when you say outside of your experience If you mean that there are things that don't depend on you. I would say that's what our experience shows Right, that's how about so so maybe I would say this that there is Uh, there are some features of existence which I am not experiencing One hopes that that's true and it seems obviously so but I don't have any experience of it. So why why would I say that? Right. So that sounds sort of like donald rumsfeld of there's the the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns Right and so there are things that you're not now experiencing that you have some knowledge of Yes, what about but it also seems reasonable to say that there are things that don't even have knowledge Exactly exactly and that's why the primates think that inquiry is never done But why would we have that belief in the first place? Or isn't that completely unjustified if we don't have any experience of it? No, no We have a great deal of experience of it We have a great deal of experience of the inadequacy of our own knowledge of the world being more than we know yes, but but of Existent things that we have absolutely no experience like some some great way out in the cosmos that I just had No conception of anything. I have a positive belief that such types of things but you see that's wrong Because you you just conceived it. You said I have no conception of it And then you just described it as being way out in the cosmos. I have no conception of it outside of the most abstract So what you're saying is yeah, so what you're saying is I have Very little conception of it. What do I have an experience of it? No, not yet Well, so there's there's a difference then there's a difference between the experiential knowledge and conceptual knowledge Well, there are probably lots of differences between that but not in the way that you mean it now if you're saying There are things that I haven't discovered That's both true of you individually, right as a kid growing up There's like things you haven't experienced right and it's also true of human beings generally Meaning we have experience of some things that aerosol didn't have experience of Right and so the idea that there are things yet to be discovered is not an incoherent notion It's completely linked to experience. It's just saying that these would be objects of a future experience But we don't have the experience now. We don't have it yet Okay, so let me those are things right those are things waiting to be discovered Let me ask you this then because this is very related absent Conscious awareness and experience like If it were the case that there were no human beings would there be anything So can I slightly I want to see if this is like a friendly Right, so what if we don't say human beings? What if we sort of say sentient beings? Sure. Okay. Yeah, okay So would there be any things? Yeah No right Depending upon what you mean by things, right? So if what you mean by that is this if you mean what if There was some Bomb that killed everyone off but left a bunch of stuff standing Do we have reason to believe that then there would be a bunch of stuff standing? Yes But that's not separate from experience. That's only later than experience But there's no there's no experiencer There is an experiencer, but there is not an experiencer at that time Right, this is like this is like asking as james points out This is like asking how do we know that they're dinosaurs because there weren't any people back then Well, but see I would I would have a more I think I would have a happier Easier time Explaining the for my in terms of my own evaluation right to talk about the dinosaurs and so what about absent any experiencer It's kind of maybe even a better way than the sentience just absent any experiencer Isn't there then you wouldn't even be able to talk about a thing? You couldn't name a thing you couldn't describe it. You couldn't use any word for it, but but that's only if we presuppose the Pragmatist starting point. No, there are no independent things separate of our experience No, see again, that's not a very helpful way to put it. There are all kinds of things that are separate in many ways from us Right, there's all kinds of independences Our experience shows that there's all kinds of independences Okay, right, but but they're not but they're not independent of experience Per se of all experience. That's that's what I was trying to get at was that So right and so you have to be careful not to let the intuition which is more than an intuition It's verified all the time that Experience shows that our life shows that there's various kinds of independences of things There's some things that don't depend on others, but but independent of experience is the key one that I was trying Yeah, I understand and so what I'm trying to say is that something makes sense within experience Is taken by many analytical philosophers or what you're calling rationalists as a claim about experience as a whole Which makes no sense whatsoever. I'm sorry. Can you say that one more time? Yeah So the fact that a distinction makes sense within a framework Yes, within the framework of life or experience or something Doesn't mean that those distinctions then make sense applied to the whole But why do I think that that's the case? Why does it seem so intuitively reasonable to think that that's okay? So my guess is right. So I don't know right. I'd have to analyze you more I mean, I don't know right, but but my guess is in talking with you that it's the result of some philosophical training and some Familiarities right and so that you have read in a certain tradition And this way of thinking seems common. We all have we have habits of doing many things including habits of thinking Right and and the pragmatists are great on this because what they say is that there are people with different temperaments And so James thinks there simply are sort of rationalistically oriented people And it doesn't mean that those philosophers. It's why he's such a plurals It doesn't mean that those philosophies are wrong for them It means this is how they make sense of the world and the world in turn seems to confirm this way of thinking There's other sorts of folks who think Quite differently, right? And we can call them sort of more empirically minded folks less rationalistic sorts of folks And this kind of thing is going to be much closer to their intuitions Right. So this is kind of just a description Well, but it's a way of sort of saying why do people have The philosophical views that they have right and and at least for the pragmatist views like they're not born with them These are things that are developed and it depends upon The country and the culture and the education that you have probably your family a whole bunch of things right and one could say Okay, that's fine. Now. We're an anthropologist that explains why there's people around the world who think differently explains why people in Tibet and people in Georgia might think in a different way right and so then the question would be like which one is right Right and the pragmatists want to say that question about right is a question about Right because these right all we've been doing is right. We've been talking about like one percent of pragmatism The epistemology right right and so because epistemology is a tiny little subset of ethics They want to say Well, okay, what set of beliefs end up being most fulfilling? What end up james talks about beliefs being cashed out in reality using that kind of americanism on purpose Right and and so it may then turn out that there's different people right and one way to look at this would be to sort of say Why would it be any more surprising? That there are two people who hold different philosophical worldviews say Then there would be that there's two people who disagree about what the best music is Some people might say I prefer to listen to jazz and somebody else's I like listening to hip-hop Right and so the pragmatist say it doesn't mean that one of them is right and the other is wrong It means that these views function in people's experience in different ways So then what's the response to piggybacking specifically off that if a pragmatist were to hear a a I guess I like the term rationalist, but we're sure that's fine. Yeah, they use this term all the time. Yeah If so, so How would you respond to something like the? Rationalists who might say the pragmatic approach to understanding and interpreting your experiences is something which is Objectively wrong when they say that that's just hubris on the part of the rationalist or that that's that's just their way of going about Yeah, hubris Applied as a personality trait maybe so right Maybe hubris, but also just wrong. I mean like flat out wrong and so Several of the pragmatists William James is a good example Really spends his life arguing against rationalists That their arguments don't work. He's very careful. He's very analytical He takes about those arguments and shows like these arguments don't reach the conclusion So I just said the right and so part of the pragmatist view here is that You cannot prove any philosophy, right? This is a pragmatist's like central point You cannot prove any philosophy including pragmatism in theory There is no philosophers lecture. There's no philosophy book that can be written. There's no argument that can be given That shows that a philosophy is correct Any more than it could show that a particular scientific claim is correct The pragmatist like this would have to be we would have to ask ourselves What do we find in life? What consequences do we find? Well, then that's what I want to say. Can we apply pragmatism to pragmatism? Yeah, right and so the Exactly and the pragmatists do apply pragmatism to pragmatism They're one of the few philosophies. I think that actually are self consistent that way and it's why they end up being pluralists, right? So that they don't claim Anybody who is not a pragmatist is therefore wrong. Didn't you just claim that about the rationalist? No, what the what the rationalist I believe generally we can talk about which which folks we're talking about, right? But what what rationalism tends to believe At least historically is that it can present arguments As arguments as theories as philosophies that show that other philosophies are mistaken Yes, okay. That's what pragmatism denies. But isn't that what it's isn't that what it's doing? Is that a self contraption? No, no, no, it's not At no point in any of the pragmatist writing do they believe that they have made the case for pragmatism Well, but they're presenting in the case against rationalism and they're not making the case against rationalism They're making the case against rationalisms for closing other possibilities But say that that's a central tenet of that's what yeah, which is why then they're showing that that view is wrong But I thought you said you they're not showing that it's wrong in theory They're showing that it's wrong in practice, right? And there was what the pragmatist says what the pragmatist says is to you that the ultimate test of any belief Whether we call it rationalist pregnancy anything else doesn't matter. It could be about pens Cliffs movies whatever The test of this the determination of whether a belief is true or false is going to be a matter of consequences Okay, right not origins. So what are the results that we get right and their view is so if someone says sort of like you do I Holded this rationalist philosophy. Yeah, and I find it makes sense in the world and it allows me to operate well and Yeah, it works right the pragmatist is going to say that claim that it works for you. That's a pragmatist claim Right. Okay. So can I yeah, that's the last thing I want to try to rephrase that And if I do it inaccurately, please So the pragmatist is saying that there's no way to prove in theory. Yes that A particular epistemology is true objectively true, right that even okay Isn't that itself a theoretical claim About epistemology, right? It would be it could be taken that way Right, which would be a kind of anti-pragmatist way to understand it Or it could be taken a pragmatic way as a claim about does experience show that this is so or not So, okay So would you say that this that even the way that a rationalist might frame the question is um is kind of an error even the question of Can you develop this? True epistemology objectively true epistemology is presupposing that there is theoretically a possibility of doing that in the first place Yeah, what I would say if we were going to put this in sort of Not very but a little more technical philosophy terminology was right. What I would be saying is that I think the pragmatists are very good at showing how Rationalist philosophers smuggle in Smuggle in premises. Yeah That they need to actually establish and can't just start out using so that a lot of this philosophy looks again in in philosophy language as a kind of Very learned begging of the question, right? Okay, so and this is this is my sticking point then Isn't theory inescapable though because aren't isn't the pragmatists still making theoretical presuppositions theorizing is inescapable at least for anybody who wants to try to deal with the world in an effective way Right, and so the question the pragmatists are in no way Anti theorists pragmatism is a theory. That's what's got the ism right attached to it Right, so it's not that theory as such is wrong Right, it's that theory understood in one way turns out to be wrong But isn't that still so that that is a theory and then the question is does experience show that to be so or not? Right and and the pragmatist answer is yeah, it does show that to be so Right and and so we could ask the same kinds of things about science, right? We could say well if you're setting up a physical Experiment here doesn't that assume some thing right and so yes, it does right? There's no Every active reasoning is an inference which means it starts somewhere and goes someplace else but I guess This specifically the pragmatist claim of the inaccuracies of the rationalists strikes me As presupposing rationalism in a sense, right not the inaccuracies But of the incoherence of the project of by pure theory Proving or disproving a philosophical way of life and you're saying you're not by criticizing that you're not a you're not appealing to a theory You're appealing to our experiences. Yeah, what the what the pragmatist essentially do is two things Right, so if you can imagine two audiences one audience is a bunch of philosophers Right, it's like that's sort of a grim audience But there it is right and what they're essentially doing there is carrying on in the same way that lawyers might talk to other Lawyers or doctors talking to other doctors They're having a kind of conversation of specialists right and what they're doing there is to say In in lots of ways through lots of books. What they're essentially doing is saying Your arguments against us do not work on your own terms, right? We will show you that your logical arguments fail right Having failed that doesn't show that anybody's right or wrong. It just shows these criticisms these arguments don't work They then turn toward a different audience of The proverbial man on the street the non-academic philosopher Or at least the non-academic philosopher qua academic philosopher and they say So This view that we're offering up isn't ruled out by logic. It is a logically possible hypothesis Let's see whether your experience confirms it If your experience confirms it Cool so much the better for pragmatism If it doesn't Then you are some other or you're A rationalist for example They then look at those people and think like does that mean that this is like a tribe of fallen, you know False believing folks. No, they think this is a group of people who who temperamentally are different from pragmatists Who see the world differently. So you're saying there is essentially no purely theoretical argument that is going to convince you of Not just convincing sounds like a rhetorical thing, right? So like will somebody be convinced Which also sounds rhetorical, right? Like let me persuade you. Let me manipulate you Right and the question is logically it never works Okay, that you can never prove any kind of rationalist conclusion without invoking rationalist premises And that statement doesn't presuppose rationalist premises and saying that no, it's just an exam Right, it's why it's why the pragmatists can only say this as a generalization not as an absolute claim That's like bring me it up bring here. Okay, but me your next argument if it's not If it's not a certain claim, then Right, then it's warranted and there's no certainty to it But if there's no certainty to it, then can't we say it might be possible? Yeah, right and the pragmatists will always say Again, if it's possible, no, no all I mean by impossible is that there has been no possibility demonstrated Okay, so the pragmatist has to always say right with sort of like a great weariness and a shrug the pragmatist has to say Okay, rationalist You know bring on your next argument. So let's see if you'll if you'll forgive the priest opposition It's theoretically possible, but there's no evidence for it. Yeah, and the right and the pragmatist thinks it's theoretically possible Okay, james says at one point that probably the philosopher he most disagrees with hagel may turn out to be right He's just saying that the evidence for that now is slim almost non-existent Okay, so the the pragmatist here is a kind of thoroughgoing experimentalist Okay, so I want to just say before we end. I want to just say one other thing That is not like a question that you've asked so you can shut me off, right? So somebody and again, it's just kind of it's Interesting to me that this has been on sort of like What I view is sort of like these little epistemological issues, right? But but somebody could wonder Why right, so the pragmatic question would be why does this matter right like who cares what's what's at stake here, right? and One answer could be This is just a bunch of specialists talking shop and trying to clear up some fine points, right? and for most of us it doesn't matter and nothing hangs on this and Yeah, I hardly understand what they're talking about and why are they so heated about these things? But you know let them be right and and so If that were the case right in other words If one is a pragmatist and looks at these issues in epistemology and thinks This is just a little bit of theoretical quibbling Again pragmatically. It doesn't make any practical difference. So it'd be kind of like saying well, that's a bad theory, but Okay, let me go and so pragmatists wouldn't worry about that right if they just thought Faulty epistemologies and metaphysical views are just faulty epistemologies and metaphysical views leave them over there and let them be They're wrong, but you know, so what? right, but so the whole thrust of pragmatism here is that um faulty epistemologies are not just faulty epistemologies that actually a lot more is at stake that what happens is all kinds of uh political and moral values get smuggled into epistemologies and to metaphysical views and so again Logic is a subset of ethics ethics because humans are social is a subset of politics so The pragmatists look at many of these other epistemologies that they view as Non-experimental and they think those are linked to non-democratic cultures They look at them as authoritarian and having privileged access and think these are linked to Political systems that are sexist or racist or exclusionary in various kinds of ways, right? And so I I just want to stress that ultimately for the pragmatists differences between epistemologies For the pragmatists take on their greatest significance when seen in a political context, right? And and questions about who's authorized to determine truth or falsity And whose evidence counts right and things like that loom large for them. There is so much Fertile Material in there. I feel like I could talk to you all. Yeah, I could talk to you. I appreciate that so I just want to stress that um, I think that for you know Poor people who stumble on some of these debates that it's easy to sort of think like wow this is really up in the clouds and I don't know really what they're talking about, but they they seem to be having a heated time of it Right and the pragmatists actually resonate with that and what they want to do is to show that These are differences that cash out in people's lives in various kinds of ways That is an excellent point and it's a wonderful note to to end on the great the practicality of philosophy Which I think a lot of people dismiss out of hand. They say it's useless and I am total agreement is it's a big deal Right. So in conclusion, are there any like book recommendations that you would give for people who are interested in pragmatism? They know that I want you want to explore the ideas that we've been talking Sure, right? And so that's you know, it's always dangerous to ask a Professor like can you recommend books because the answer is like yes, I have a shelf of stuff, right? Right, but so, you know, I would say that if if people wanted to Kind of look at the the short greatest hits collection of pragmatism, right? I would say One interesting place to start is kind of the the early origins of pragmatism in some of the essays of emerson So I would say read things like the american scholar Read self-reliance read his essay experience and these are things that are not written for an academic audience and so Even though they're A century and a half old they have a kind of vitality You know the bible of pragmatism, I suppose is probably william james's book pragmatism, right? So And that's a bunch of public lectures and one of the nice things about james is he's not writing for professors. He's writing To be heard to give lectures and in these days. It's kind of amazing We can't capture james james went around the country and he was like a rock star of his era and Thousands of people would come and sit in the audience and he spoke to people who are not academic So I would say that would be that would be one place to look at right And then going from the earliest to sort of the the classical high point to sort of the latest Right, if I if I don't you know, uh, I'll uh, I'll be good enough not like to cite my own books Right, but I would say a book that's very accessible that shows some of the political Force of this is richard rorty's book achieving our country, which maybe has a special Vitality, uh, you know around elections and politics, uh in the world today Also pretty accessible. So those would be three things. I think would be useful and and and one last thing And that is just saying I think that what you said about the value or usefulness of Philosophy is is very much true and very very important and I think there it's really important to distinguish between Academic philosophy some of which may not be so important and philosophy understood in a broader more living sense that certainly is So there are definitely things about my discipline and some of my colleagues I'm not sure, you know, how important some of that is But I think philosophy in the broader sense of the way that we the worldview that we have that's very very important On that note. Thank you so much dr. Sturer. Thank you. I haven't greatly enjoyed this All right, so that was my interview with dr. John Stur who's the distinguished professor of philosophy at emory university Wow, what an interview. I wasn't overstating it I hope you guys enjoyed that as much as I enjoyed being there I kept him longer than I originally said when I was scheduling the interview with him So it was kind enough to sit down and answer most of my questions I feel like we could have talked for another Several hours on the topic But if you like this style of interview and you like the depth that we're getting to in these conversations Please make sure to subscribe on itunes and stitcher Tell your friends share it around and if you want to help support the creation of the show Then make sure you head over to patreon.com Slash steve patterson You can become a patron of the show which simply means that whenever I release new content like this You pledge one dollar of support and as more people hear about the show and pledge their support It's going to allow this show to continue indefinitely in the future. So thanks for listening and I'll talk to you next week