[Tom Burke, a Stanford Ph.D. and author ofDewey's New Logic, is associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina (http://people.cas.sc.edu/burket/). I invited him to guest blog on the topic of pragmatism, which he didn't think we quite did justice to on our program of a few weeks ago. --jp]

What Is Pragmatism?

by Tom Burke
Department of Philosophy
University of South Carolina

像任何哲学上的“主义”一样，实用主义使自己容易被反驳稻草人的特征;无论如何，毫无疑问，还有一些低级的实用主义形式(短视、自私、精明、无原则)。但皮尔斯、詹姆斯、杜威、米德等人的各种观点，在回顾了这些肤浅的人物塑造之后，比人们可能认为的要复杂得多。麦克德莫特教授声称，实用主义与其说是一种特殊的哲学立场，不如说是一种哲学态度。这就方便地解决了旨在破坏实用主义作为一种特殊哲学立场的批判策略，但如果我们想要理解实用主义是什么，还需要更多的论述。

First of all, pragmatism is not a single philosophy. There is no single pragmatist epistemology, no single pragmatist metaphysics. More particularly, there is not just one pragmatist theory of truth. Rather, pragmatism is a style or way of doing philosophy. As such, it allows a variety of views on just about any philosophical topic. It cannot be directly confirmed or refuted but will merely fail or succeed in ways that philosophical styles fail or succeed. So the question remains: what is it? How might we characterize pragmatism so as to clearly distinguish it from other ways of doing philosophy?

One could argue that the variety of possible pragmatist philosophies is a matter of family resemblance. That would not be very illuminating. I would claim instead (drawing more on historical hindsight than on what any particular pragmatist has ever said) that to qualify as pragmatist a philosophy need satisfy just one criterion: it must essentially and substantively endorse the pragmatic maxim. This maxim has been stated and interpreted in multiple ways, and such multiplicity is unavoidable. Nevertheless I'm suggesting that a pragmatist philosophy must formulate it, interpret it, and essentially depend on it, whether as a basic assumption or as derived from other basic assumptions. It's as simple as that.

詹姆斯1898年在伯克利的演讲中首次公开了实用主义，他确实引用并讨论了皮尔斯在1878年的原话:“考虑可能具有实际意义的效果，我们设想我们概念的对象具有什么效果。”那么，我们对这些效应的概念就是我们对客体概念的整体"要确定这句格言到底说了什么，显然不是一件小事。詹姆斯对这个词的解释和使用让皮尔斯深为厌恶，皮尔斯本人在接下来的几年中多次重新定义了这个词。但他们各自的观点的一个共同特点是，坚持这一格言的某些版本，这使他们的观点成为实用主义的，无论他们在其他方面有多么不同。

因此，考虑到皮尔斯的原始表述是如此错综复杂，对实用主义格言制定一个更精确的表述可能会有所帮助。我们应该注意到，实用主义(与这个词本身的词源保持一致)强调实践或行动，就像它强调效果或后果一样。这在皮尔斯强调可能的实践的可能的效果中很明显，即，可能的效果与可能的实际轴承。在这些基础上，在更晚的时间里，罗蒂是我们可以称之为话语实用主义者的人，因为他所关心的行动和效果在本质上是专门的话语——不是说话语是他所关心的一切，而是只有在对话方面，实用主义格言的某些版本才在罗蒂的哲学中起作用。当然，其他类型的实用主义承认更广泛的可能行动及其可能的影响。为了突出实用主义与纯粹的话语实用主义的区别，或者为了表明实用主义格言能够达到的深度，回想一下奎因的著名格言:“存在即是变量的价值”。这本身不是一个形而上学的主张，尽管它对如何形成形而上学的主张有一定的限制。它反映了一种哲学研究的风格或方式，可以说，它从根本上是面向可能的“实体”或“事物”，而不是面向可能行动的可能效果。与奎因的格言相比，实用主义的另一种说法可能是这样的:“成为一个可能行动的可能效果，就是成为一个变量的值。”也就是说，与特定行动方式相关的变量将在各自的可能结果范围内存在，基本命题将涉及这些结果和/或行动方式之间的关系，等等。这几乎不是标准一阶语义的典型，在这种情况下，我们会想要重新思考当代分析哲学所依赖的整个形式逻辑基础。 The point here is that pragmatism, no less than Quine's first-order-logicism, puts constraints on how to formulate philosophical views by stipulating what one may take to be semantically basic. For Quine, our philosophical language takes entities or things as a semantic basis for devising theories and models of how the world works. For a pragmatist, one's philosophical language takes actions and their effects as a semantic basis for devising theories and models of how the world works. This is what Peirce meant, I claim, by asserting that possible effects of possible actions must ground our fundamental terminology for formulating and clarifying our ideas. The latter couple of sentences constitute what I think is a more precise statement of the pragmatic maxim.

With all of that said, one might (only) now begin to think about various pragmatist accounts of truth, or about how and whether a pragmatist might or might not be a realist. I hope it is clear that one can be all over the philosophical map with regard to either of those topics while still being a pragmatist, just as one can be all over the philosophical map while being a first-order logicist.

特别是，实用主义者不需要像他们声称的那样，认为“任何想法的意义和真理都是其实际结果的功能。”实用主义者可能会试图为这种说法辩护。但另一位实用主义者可能有理由认为，这种说法如果不是错误的话，就是太简单了，因为它从谈论行动的效果转向了想法的结果。什么叫想法会产生结果呢?这可能是有意义的，但需要某种故事将这样的主张与实用主义格言联系起来。因此，作为实用主义的表征，这种主张本身是不够的。同样，一个实用主义者可能会发现这样的说法毫无条理，在这种情况下，我们也不能说这是实用主义的必要特征。

It was also claimed that "the pragmatists rejected all forms of absolutism and insisted that all principles be regarded as working hypotheses that must bear fruit in lived experience." Okay, some if not all existent pragmatists may have so insisted in one way or another; but it is not obvious that this is an essential feature of pragmatism given that one can insist thusly without being a pragmatist, i.e., with no cognizance whatsoever of the pragmatic maxim. Once again, talking in terms of experiential fruits of hypotheses may be understood, e.g., in purely Quinean first-order-logicist terms with no regard at all for the pragmatic maxim. Such a claim, then, is not sufficient as a characterization of pragmatism. Nor is it necessary, given that the pragmatic maxim does not by itself rule out all forms of absolutism. Not very many (if any) pragmatists have gone down that particular road, but that road is not obviously blocked by the pragmatic maxim alone.

所有这些的结果是，理解实用主义格言是理解什么是实用主义的关键。要确定一种哲学立场是否实用主义，就要看它是否、在哪里以及如何运用这一格言。如果这个格言在哪里都找不到，或者即使能找到，但它没有任何重要的哲学作用，那么这个立场，无论它可能是什么，都不是实用主义者。