 Pragmatism is quite a tangled web of wildly different beliefs and approaches to philosophy. Let's see if we can loosen some purse strings. We've talked a little in previous episodes about pragmatism, a fairly recent branch of philosophy that shares a certain attitude. Many people critique philosophers for endlessly dissecting questions and ideas that don't have any practical value, and pragmatists more or less agree with that assessment. They're decidedly uninterested in whether angels occupy physical space or if math is discovered or invented. They're more interested in dissolving metaphysical questions and focusing on philosophy that plays a role in action, in getting stuff done. The pragmatist tradition encompasses a diverse set of ideas built on this general vibe, and was kicked off in the early 20th century by this dude, Charles Perce. Whose name looks like it should be pronounced Pierce, but it's actually Perce. Perce's ideas found an audience among fellow philosophers and polymaths, William James and John Dewey, who set out to write their own works and spread the word about this new American contribution to philosophy. This was a mixed blessing. James and Dewey's takes on Perce's pragmatism were exciting, inspiring, got people talking about a breath of fresh air in the musty halls of philosophy, and he hated them. He was a logician. He chose his words very carefully to convey exactly what he was thinking, and these two chuckleheads were very enthusiastically using the word pragmatism and then spewing all sorts of stuff that had only a tenuous relationship to Perce's original mission. I'm all for reinterpretation and finding new meaning in stuff, but I think it's worth trying to understand what Perce originally meant and how the myriad notions that developed in his wake might have diverged from that intent. His most influential works are a pair of papers based on some lectures, titled The Fixation of Belief and How to Make Our Ideas Clear. They lay out Perce's approach to philosophy in a relatively straightforward way, and if you have a couple hours to read them, you might get why being co-opted into a more freewheeling anything goes approach irked him so much that he renamed his philosophy pragmatism to distinguish it from the intellectual children he was so embarrassed by. The fixation of belief is Perce's take on reasoning and inquiry, an explanation as to why scientific approaches have become so crucial to the enterprise of figuring stuff out. He suggests that we have natural faculties of thought that often guide us to correct conclusions, but it doesn't take much to lead us astray, and this is troubling to us because of the nature of belief and doubt. For Perce, belief isn't just idly fancying that some idea is true, it's tightly bound up with behavior. A belief is merely a habit of action, an inclination to behave in a certain way. You can say the words round up is perfectly safe to drink, you might convince yourself that that's what you believe, but if you won't drink weed killer, Perce would say that you don't really believe it. If belief is a disposition to act, its opposite is doubt, a decidedly unpleasant state of indecision that demands some sort of resolution, prompting us to engage in inquiry until we overcome it and feel like we know what to do. For Perce, the whole point of reasoning and inquiry is to escape the uncomfortable state of doubt and fix ourselves in a state of belief again, to ready ourselves for action. He happily admits that there are many ways to achieve this goal. You can just stick your fingers in your ears and refuse to change your mind, come what may. You can cede your beliefs to some authority. You can believe whatever seems most attractive to those natural faculties of thought that we mentioned. But although each of these approaches has some upside, they also leave room for doubt to creep back in. If you run into someone who disagrees with you, or some alternate authority, or notice that your natural faculties lead you to different conclusions than the faculties of others, well, those are grounds for doubt. Perce claims that the problem with each is essentially the same. Humans are in constant, confused, easily misled, and relying solely on humans to establish what we ought to believe is likely going to throw us back into doubt at some point. The more expedient way to fix belief and escape doubt is to pin it on something that isn't human, something constant and external to all the messy, ever-changing stuff happening between our ears. In short, reality. Now, if you've had any experience with logic grows, you might instinctively roll your eyes at what sounds like a wind-up to some breathless, uncritical, eye-fucking-love-science BS. But Perce notes explicitly that there's no such thing as an observation without an interpretation attached. He only suggests that the success of science in the arena of belief and doubt can be largely attributed to the way that it aims at the objective stuff that underpins our subjective experience. With a large enough group of people diligently engaging in inquiry together over a long enough time frame, all the wacky errors human minds are prone to will succumb to the unchanging bedrock of their collective experience. What's real? Science is great at establishing belief and calling doubt because it's striving towards some objective reality, even if that characterization always ends up filtered through our fuzzy human stuff. Which leads us to wonder, is there any way to eliminate some of the fuzz from that signal? Is there a method we might use to make our ideas clear? Oh, hey. In his closely linked second paper, Perce advances a technique to clarify ideas, to reduce the amount of noise we add to what reality is trying to tell us. A technique he calls the pragmatic maxim. If beliefs are merely habits, predispositions to act, it doesn't make any sense to distinguish between beliefs that produce the same behavior in all conceivable situations. You may have been in a meeting where some folks have engaged in what's termed a violent agreement. One person insists that we should be up on our documentation, so if someone leaves a project, we can still figure out how to move forward. While someone else argues vehemently that we should be up on our documentation, so we can use it as a reference for similar projects in the future. And they go back and forth that way. For hours. Perce suggests that because what we're really after is the habits they produce, we can clarify our ideas by focusing on what practical differences they make in what we choose to do. Through that lens, the violent disagreement we were describing is instantly revealed as silly. There's no world in which one person would keep up on documentation and the other wouldn't. The two beliefs result in exactly the same behavior. So, by the pragmatic maxim, we might as well treat them as the same belief. Now, if you've watched either of my previous episodes on some other branches of pragmatism, you may be scratching your head at how this guy's philosophy became associated with those ideas. Pragmatism can get really out there, with takes ranging from truth is whatever works for you to truth is totally inaccessible to humans. Perce's actual philosophical contribution is much less audacious. He might appreciate later authors' disdain for conceptual analysis, but he's obviously committed to realism and the ultimate ability of humans to converge on something like truth. The pragmatic maxim isn't some wild reshuffling of ontology, at least not the way he originally wrote it. It's a conceptual tool to make it easier to see any meaningful distinctions between various beliefs. It caused him no small amount of distress to see his ideas hijacked by other philosophers, but maybe Perce would be happy knowing that even after a century of crazy shenanigans with his name attached, some folks went back to what he actually wrote and noted that it recommends an entirely different course of action. Do you think Perce's notions about belief and doubt stand to inspection? Can you think of a way to use the pragmatic maxim on your own philosophical quandaries? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to follow us, subscribe, bless your ear, and don't stop thunking.