Pragmatism and consciousness
Explanation
Pragmatism is the great originally North American philosophical tradition founded by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and developed by William James (1842-1910), John Dewey (1859-1952), George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) and, in a second generation, Richard Rorty (1931-2007), Hilary Putnam (1926-2016), Robert Brandom and Cornel West. Pragmatism has contributed one of the richest and most influential reflections on consciousness, experience and mind.
Peirce formulated the "pragmatic maxim": the meaning of a concept consists in the set of conceivable practical consequences it would have if it were true. Concepts have no meaning in the abstract but in their potential effects on action and experience. This provided a methodology for "clarifying" philosophical ideas: reducing speculative disputes to questions about practical differences, discarding as empty those that produced no differences.
William James extended pragmatism to psychology and general philosophy. His Principles of Psychology (1890) is a classic on consciousness: the "stream of consciousness" as a continuous, ever-changing flow, the selective character of attention, the mind-body relation, the will, emotions. James was a pluralist (he rejected simplifications to a single principle) and took very seriously exceptional phenomena of consciousness (religious, mystical, paranormal experiences, altered states), as shown in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).
Dewey, in works such as Experience and Nature (1925), Art as Experience (1934), elaborated a philosophy of experience as continuous organism-environment interaction. Consciousness is not the private property of the isolated subject, but a phase of organic-environmental interaction in specific situations. Intelligence is the capacity to problematically reorganise experience; education, democracy, ethics, are all ways of intelligently elaborating collective experience.
Mead developed a social theory of self-consciousness: the "self" emerges in and through symbolic interaction (gestures, language) with others. His famous distinction between the "I" (impulsive, spontaneous) and the "Me" (socialised, responding to others' expectations) articulates how self-consciousness is constituted dialogically in the social process. This perspective has been fundamental for symbolic interactionism in sociology.
For the theory of consciousness, pragmatism contributes an anti-dualist, processual, functional and situated perspective: consciousness is not an inner substance but a process of organism-environment interaction; it is not an ultimate datum to be explained but a specific adaptive function; it is plural, multiple, dynamic. Pragmatism converges with many intuitions of contemporary neuroscience (enactive theories, embodied mind, extended mind), with non-dualist contemplative traditions, with social approaches to cognition. Richard Rorty in the 20th century extended pragmatism in dialogue with Wittgenstein and continental philosophy, in his famous work Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). As a tradition that avoids the extremes of Cartesian dualism, reductive materialism and pure idealism, pragmatism remains one of the most fertile perspectives for thinking of consciousness as embodied, situated and dialogical experience.
Strengths
- Pioneering integration of psychology and philosophy.
- Openness to plurality of experiences.
- Solid functional-adaptive conception.
- Vast influence in 20th-21st century.
Main critiques
- Risk of relativism.
- Tension with strong realism.
- Some formulations may seem circular.