3.2 Foundation of Pragmatism
3.2.1 Pragmatist Categories
Central to Peirce’s thinking is the pervasive categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness.
Peirce was particularly interested in refuting Cartesian duality through the use of triadic relationships. With few exceptions, Peirce uses sets of threes (Plowright, 2016).
• Firstness
Firstness is represented by monads and is potential which can only be experienced. It is not the actualisation but the possibility of actualisation. Firstness is linked to freshness, freedom and feeling and exists purely as an emotion disjointed from the feeler. Firstness is the quality or disembodied feeling which is not determined by other ideas but by reflective curiosity (Plowright, 2016, p. 81). It is the one or monadic (Brent, 1993).
• Secondness
Secondness is the embodiment of firstness and is represented by dyads. It is about linkedness, relation, opposition and struggle (Plowright, 2016, p. 82). Secondness recognises otherness and acknowledges both action and reaction with the potential for conflict. Hence it holds the potential for interaction and transaction. It is linked to time and space and is not restricted to material objects but includes cognitive thoughts. Comparisons about an item's firsts - or qualities - is a second which embodies firsts (Plowright, 2016). Secondness is where reality and truth exist, according to Peirce. Individual facts arise through their interaction with other facts (Plowright, 2016). Dewey referred to generic interactions in nature as transactions and experiences between living organisms and their environment (Biesta, 2014). Truth is found in the concept of consequences that lead to action. It is not the actual consequence but the potential to become a practical action that gives meaning to something. Consequently, it is Peirce's “principal operative concept” (Samuels, 2000, p. 213).
• Thirdness
Thirdness is the law or generality represented by triads that refers to not only that which exists but to everything that could possibly be conceived to exist (Plowright, 2016). Whereas secondness is the specific, thirdness is the generic and the mediator of seconds (Parmentier, 1994). Thirdness links the past and the present with the hope of the future and extends beyond qualities independent of time and what exists in time. Thirdness is what may exist in the future, and thus, it allows for predicting. Without thirdness, life exists only in the present, reacting to events as stimulus-response entities.
92 Peirce regards thoughts as signs (Samuels, 2000) which are understood as a triadic relationship between sign, object and interpretant. Thus, thirdness is a manifestation of thinking that mediates between sign and object, enabling an understanding of propositions and concepts that may be applied in the future (Plowright, 2016). Plowright (2016, p. 86) uses the example of a rabbit hole to explain secondness and thirdness. A person walking through a field steps in a rabbit hole and sprains an ankle. The combination of rabbit-hole-walker is two separate dyadic events that exist as secondness, not a triad. Thirdness requires a mediator such as a farmer who notices the rabbit holes and considers options for limiting the dangers of stepping in the holes by erecting fences to keep the rabbits out of the field.
Thirdness provides future possibilities by drawing on generalities.
Categories Summary
The categories bind Peirce’s semiotics, pragmatism and method of inquiry (Plowright, 2016).
Peirce’s concepts of “being” and “substance” can assist in understanding the categories. For example, “The stove is black” shows the substance “stove” having the quality “black” linked by “is” (Plowright, 2016, p. 78). Quality is the initial concept providing the ability to understand the object based on its substance. This allows the formulation of testable propositions. Substances may have many qualities or attributes that emerge over time and are cognitively linked to understanding the substances (Plowright, 2016). Secondness results in a dichotomy that sets the quality (black) apart from the human agent and anything else such as green or stove. Rorty’s notion of inquiry suggests a (re)weaving of experience and action as a thirdness to resolve the dichotomy of humans and other concepts, resulting in a relatedness between the variables of ideas and concepts. Hence, an experience is a causal relationship between humans and their environment extending beyond sensation to include concepts (Rorty et al., 2004). Accordingly, Peirce’s firstness “feeling” leads to secondness as specific interactions (or transactions) which is experienced and generalised in thirdness (Plowright, 2016).
Applying pragmatism
Rorty equates pragmatism with the practice of making our way in the world (Rorty et al., 2004). For Rorty, pragmatism is a “second stage of enlightenment” (ibid., p.77). The first enlightenment saw people reduce their dependency on mythology to move through the world by scientific understanding. The second enlightenment recognised that scientific
93 reasoning is not sufficient. Moral and intellectual forces from communities of human activity replace science and the gods of mythology. Consequently, human practice may derive from communities without scientific rationality or the grace of a god without diminishing the place of mythology and scientific enquiry. Building on these underlying structures, pragmatism looks to human actions to define the world. It suggests that human actors' experiences – whether mythos or logos – are subject to human interpretation for action. Pragmatism believes that within communities with similar morals and intellect, there is a likelihood that similar actions – or intentions to act - will ensue and change “the real world” (Rorty et al., 2004, p. 79).
Pragmatism is not concerned with arbitrary beliefs of real and true (Rorty et al., 2004). Truth and reality are concepts that cannot be defined; therefore, it is a waste of time to argue about undefinable meanings. On the other hand, concepts can be extended through peer justification (Rorty et al., 2004). Shusterman (2010) argues that pragmatism is a unity of practice and theory as humans create action before rational thought. Change and chance are integral to our lives, and while facts may be discovered, they are also created through human activity. Pragmatism uses praxis to support concepts as part of philosophy, and theory emerges from experiences which may guide further experience. Thus, humans need good beliefs to guide action without the need for an absolute truth. Consequently, pragmatists insist on warranted belief rather than absolute truths (Rorty et al., 2004; Shusterman, 2010).
Warranted belief is contextual for meaning through language and culture relevant to each community (Shusterman, 2010). Pragmatism must be viewed as holistic and future-looking based on empirical experienced-based actions that aim to improve lives (Shusterman, 2010).
Shusterman (2010) suggests that a central tenet of pragmatism is plurality, embodied in thirdness and resulting in pragmatism being contextual. However, people are creatures of habit, and whereas science and rational thought are fundamental to pragmatism, people may not take a rational stance (Shusterman, 2010). Habits make life bearable for many people and become entrenched, which requires a disruption to change.
Peirce is more pedantic than the other classical pragmatists regarding concepts becoming more accurate the more they work (Rorty et al., 2004). The obscure style, unfinished writing and isolation from James and Dewey made Peirce unpopular. Dewey and James regarded things as true if they work and solve real-world problems (Wehrwein, 2019) but differed in
94 their focus on body/mind (James) and means/ends (Dewey) (Wehrwein, 2019). Dewey sees means-ends as reifying each other through action with no causal outcome to motivate action.
For Dewey, action is taken in anticipation of the end's potential benefits reconstituted by action (Wehrwein, 2019).
Democracy for Dewey was fundamental. Democracy is the intelligent actions taken by a community to solve problems against a background of morality defined by the community's shared habits. Values are reconstructed over time, and pragmatic philosophy results in pursuing a method derived from experience in contrast to pure reasoning (Wehrwein, 2019).
Thus, knowledge creation is limited. Initially, this appears to be a restrictive view of knowledge creation based solely on experience. Nevertheless, Webb (2004, p. 487) points out that experience refers to “the totality of transactions between sentient organisms and their environing situation ... that means the history and the ongoing process of such transactions between organism and environment ”.
The notion of habit as temporal social “conjoint” actions is essential to Dewey’s social ontology, which brings forth a domain of entities (Testa, 2017). Actions equate to life processes rather than intentional action, which Dewey considers as a secondary habit. Habit is imperative as Dewey regards human activity as always arising from prior action (Testa, 2017). Prior actions with current activity mean that habit is modified through action and is not repetitive. The social activities that constitute habit are part of a social form of life and thus need to be considered in conjunction with the community. This requires reflective and critical thought leading to reflective habit (Testa, 2017). Dewey refers to the process of habit- formation as habituation which leads to patterns of action (Testa, 2017). The key to habituation, according to Testa (2017), is to recognise the patterns.
While pragmatism has been accused of being an American-centric philosophy, Biesta and Burbules (2003) point out the prevalence of pragmatism forms, including the Europeans Quine, Davidson and Putnam. Goldkuhl is another European author who recommends pragmatism as an alternative to interpretive, positivist and critical epistemologies (Goldkuhl, 2012). Although pragmatism has realist roots (Dewey, 1905), it is not the relationship between concepts as much as the transactions (secondness) between them that lead to a beneficial outcome (Cherryholmes, 1992).
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