Schiller's Pragmatism

In his interpretation of pragmatism, Schiller follows James’s lead in “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” that pragmatism cannot be seen merely as a device for determining the meaning of a statement or belief, but that it must also determine what makes that statement or believe true. As Schiller remarks in his review of the fourth volume of Peirce’s Collected Papers, “[Peirce’s] principle was ostensibly a rule for determining meaning and eliminating the unmeaning. But it was impossible to overlook its bearing on all attempts to determine truth.”

It would not be too much to say that Schiller’s own view of pragmatism is entirely overshadowed by his views on truth. In his Encyclopaedia Britannica article on pragmatism, he gives the following rendition of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim:
      The real difference between two conceptions lies in their application, in the different consequences for the purposes of life which their acceptance caries. When no such “practical” difference can be found, conceptions are identical; when they will not “work”, i.e., when they thwart the purpose which demanded them, they are false; when they are inapplicable they are unmeaning (A. Sidgwick). Hence, the “principle of Peirce” may be formulated as being that “every truth has practical consequences, and these are the test of its truth”.

One can see a marked shift in the meaning of “pragmatism”. Whereas for Peirce, the maxim is a principle to determine the meaning of the terms we use, the term “truth” being one of them. Schiller makes the maxim a principle to distinguish true conceptions (or beliefs) from false ones. True beliefs are those that work and false beliefs are those that don’t.

This view of truth immediately raises the crucial question of what it means for a belief to work. For Schiller, all our thoughts, and hence all our concepts, are always purpose-directed. In fact, the main reason Schiller embraced pragmatism was its insistence “that the purposive character of mental life must influence and pervade our most remotely cognitive activities”. All our conceptions, no matter how abstract and how far removed from our daily lives they might be, are ultimately purpose-directed. This purpose-directedness of all our thought led Schiller to conclude that the truth of any conception is a function of its use or application. What makes a belief or an assertion true is its effect on “any human interest”, and more specifically on “the interest with which it is directly concerned”. Hence Schiller concludes,
      Pragmatism, then, in its wider sense, refers to the way in which our attributions of ‘truth’ and our recognitions of ‘reality’ are established and verified by their working, and sooner or later brought to the definite test of experiments which succeed or fail, i.e., give or deny satisfaction to some human interest, and are valued accordingly. (The Definition of “Pragmatism” and ‘Humanism’, p237f)

Schiller’s Humanism

Schiller’s humanism is best understood as a reaction against the attempts to “de-humanize” knowledge. Humanism, for Schiller, is a “systematic protest against the artificial elimination of the human aspects of knowing”. Schiller insists repeatedly that we should never lose sight of Protagoras’s maxim that “man is the measure of all things”. Philosophical conceptions such as truth, reality, determination, etc., must always be kept within our own human perspective and may not be “dehumanized”.

When we abstract in actual thinking, this abstraction is not absolute, as something that can be separated wholly from the purposes and conditions that gave rise to it, but is an instrument of though, designed to help us cope with the world wherein we live. Without a context, abstraction is devoid of meaning.

In Schiller’s view, Western philosophy took a wrong turn with Plato. In Plato’s time, philosophy was in a dilemma. On the one side, there were the followers of Heraclitus, who believed that everything was in a constant flux. On the other side, there were the Eleatics who believed that everything was absolutely static. Both views made knowledge impossible. For the followers of Heraclitus, it was impossible to assert anything about anything, since everything keeps changing; nothing is stable enough for an assertion to refer to it. For the Eleatics, the problem was a different one. Because of their fundamental commitment to the unity od being, the only assertion they could make was to declare the being of being: ”What is, is.”
According to Schiller, Plato found a way out of this when he discovered the function of concepts in the organization of experience. By using a concept, an idea could be predicated of the Heraclitan flux. Whereas the object of the idea would continue to change, the concept through which the object is lifted out of the flux of experience, would remain constant.
Using concepts, allowed Plato to attach permanence to the flux of experience in a way that avoided the problem of the undifferentiated unity of the Eleatic “one”. In its place we get “a well-knit system of knowable ideas”.
The central problem that Plato subsequently ran into was that of the interface between the Heraclitan flux of experience and this stable system of “knowable ideas”. Plato’s allegory of the cave in the Republic was one attempt to bridge the gap between the eternal world of ideas and the perpetual flux of experience.

For Schiller, it was Protagoras who gave Plato the answer to this problem, albeit Plato failed to recognize this. As Schiller sees it, what connected, for Protagoras, the ideas with the flux of sensory impressions is that they are useful for us humans in our dealings with the world within which we live. This is the true meaning of the claim that man is the measure of all things. The idea of a snow shovel is constituted, not by something otherworldly within the realm of ideas, but simply by the fact that it enables us to scoop snow. It is this usefulness that gives the idea of the snow shovel its stability.

The requirement of making ourselves the measure of all things holds not only for philosophy, Schiller contends, but for the sciences as well. All scientific knowledge is intimately related to human needs and desires, and the world shaped by science is ultimately a human world.

SOCIAL BEHAVIORISM
Social behaviorism refers to the emergence of mind and self from the communication process between organisms - a social process which is largely symbolic, i.e. linguistic.
Thus, whereas conventional thinking posits the logical primacy of the individual over society, and assumes that the individual is the building block of society, Mead reversed this, arguing that society precedes the individual.
For Mead, the social process is prior to the structures and processes of individual experience. Individual psychology is intelligible only in terms of social processes.

In Mind, Self and Society (1934), Mead describes how the individual mind and self arises out of the social process. The "development of the individual's self, and of his self- consciousness within the field of his experience" is preeminently social.

Mind, according to Mead, arises within the social process of communication and cannot be understood apart from that process. The communicational process involves two phases: (1) the "conversation of gestures" and (2) language, or the "conversation of significant gestures." Both phases presuppose a social context within which two or more individuals are in interaction with one another.

SYMBOLIC INTERACTION
Symbolic interactionism is the study of the patterns of communication, interpretation, and adjustment between individuals.
The social process that produces the self is called socialization. The sine qua non for socialization is symbolic thought, or language. Language consists of significant gestures or symbols, and it is an inherently social phenomenon, since a gesture is only significant if it evokes the same response in oneself as it is intended to elicit in another. Such meaningful communication occurs through role-taking. By taking the role of the other, Mead meant putting oneself in the place of another individual in such a manner that one arouses the same response in both. Only symbolic interaction is truly social in the sense that it requires role-taking. The “social” organization of ants and bees, while complex and sophisticated, is based on instinct, not role-taking.

Mead distinguished several phases of socialization, notably the "play phase" and the "game phase." The former stage occurs when the young child begins to take the role of individual significant others. For the game stage, which is a later developmental stage, Mead used baseball as a metaphor: In order to successfully participate in a game of baseball, the individual must take the role of the generalized other, i.e. the entire social structure and its rules. And so it is with participating in society.

The Self, the I and the Me
According to Mead, a self is "that which can be object to itself," or that "which is reflexive, i.e. which can be both subject and object.". The self, then, represents reflexive experience, simultaneous organic and mental activity. Only humans are capable of this. Only humans have, and are, selves. Lower animals have feelings such as pleasure and pain, but these belong to the organism, not to the self, for the feelings have no symbolic meaning.

Following William James, Mead found it convenient to express the dual and reflexive nature of the self through the concepts of the "I" and the "me." "The self is essentially a social process going on with these two distinguishable phases." In other words, the "I" is the subjective and active phase of the self, and the "me" is the objective and passive phase.

Mead also rooted the self’s "perception and meaning" deeply and sociologically in "a common praxis of subjects" (Joas) found specifically in social encounters. Understood as a combination of the "I" and the "me," Mead’s self proved to be noticeably entwined within a sociological existence: For Mead, existence in this community comes before individual consciousness. Thus, just as Mead's theory of knowledge and value is a philosophy of the act from the standpoint of the experiencing individual in interaction with the physical environment, his view of the self is of that self emerging through social acts involving interaction with other individuals.

Mead argues that the individual is a product of an ongoing, preexisting society, or more specifically, social interaction that is a consequence of a sui generis society. The self arises when the individual becomes an object to themselves. Mead argued that we are objects first to other people, and secondarily we become objects to ourselves by taking the perspective of other people. Language enables us to talk about ourselves in the same way as we talk about other people, and thus through language we become other to ourselves. In joint activity, which Mead called 'social acts', humans learn to see themselves from the standpoint of their co-actors. A central mechanism within the social act, which enables perspective taking, is position exchange. People within a social act often alternate social positions (e.g., giving/receiving, asking/helping, winning/losing, hiding/seeking, talking/listening). In children's games there is repeated position exchange, for example in hide-and-seek, and Mead argued that this is one of the main ways that perspective taking develops.

The Meadian perspective can be termed humanistic, in that it focuses on human uniqueness, rather than on our similarities with other species. Our ability to symbolize frees us from our environment and from our past. While much of human behavior is habitual, there always remains an element of unpredictability and freedom, which Mead conceptualized as the “I" phase of the self. The lesson that Mead teaches is that, in the end, no social theorist will ever be able to fully predict human behavior.

SOCIAL PRAGMATISM
The two most important roots of Mead's work are the philosophy of pragmatism and social behaviorism.
Mead is considered a major American philosopher by virtue of being, along with Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, one of the founders of pragmatism.
Mead argues that the individual is a product of society, the "self" arising out of social experience as an object of socially symbolic gestures and interactions. Rooted intellectually in social behaviorism, Mead’s self was a self of practical and pragmatic intentions.

Mead, like Dewey, developed a more naturist philosophy that was based upon human action and specifically communicative action. Human activity is, in a pragmatic sense, the criterion of truth, and through human activity meaning is made. Joint activity, including communicative activity, is the means through which our sense of self is constituted.
Mead grounded human perception in an "action-nexus" (Joas). We perceive the world in terms of the “means of living”. To perceive food, is to perceive eating. To perceive a house, is to perceive shelter. That is to say, perception is in terms of action.

In philosophy, Mead was one of the major thinkers among the American Pragmatists. In common with a number of his contemporaries, he was much-influenced by the theory of relativity and the doctrine of emergence. His philosophy might be called objective Relativism. Just as some objects are edible, but only in relation to a digestive system, so Mead thought of experience, life, consciousness, personality, and value as objective properties of nature which emerge only under (and hence are relative to) specific sets of conditions.

Mead developed the most comprehensive of the pragmatist theories of mind. He depicted the evolution of mind and self-consciousness as emerging from social interactions and the use of gestures and “significant symbols” such as words. In contrast to other creatures, an individual regarded as having mind, engaging with others in social acts, can respond to his own gestures as others respond to them—thus taking on social roles and becoming an “other” in respect to himself. It is therefore by means of language, the use of “significant symbols,” that mind emerges.

Fundamental to Mead’s philosophy is his conception of the social act, in which individuals modify and direct one anothers’ activities, work out their purposes, and accordingly transform their environments. In the social act the future controls present conduct, and this is distinctive of consciousness. Since the function of intelligence is to render the world “favourable for conduct,” Mead viewed the development of scientific knowledge and the evolutionary process as coinciding.

For Mead, mind and self arise out of the social act of communication. His theory of "mind, self, and society" is, in effect, a philosophy of the act from the standpoint of a social process involving the interaction of many individuals, just as his theory of knowledge and value is a philosophy of the act from the standpoint of the experiencing individual in interaction with an environment.

Lewis’ philosophy focused on one of the key problems of pragmatism, namely, how to reconcile the notion that our experience is malleable to our purposes with the notion that facts are “hard”. Lewis found his answer in a pragmatic epistemology that brought together "the given", the world of “hard fact” that is not subject to our will, and the a priori which, being a creation of ours, is subject to our will and malleable to our courses.

THE NATURE of KNOWLEDGE
For Lewis, empirical knowledge is in essence a triadic affair. Its three elements are what Lewis called “the given”, a priori conceptual schemes, and something to connect the two together.
“The given” is that element in perception that “remains unaltered, no matter what our interests, no matter how we think or conceive” (Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge p52, - C.I. Lewis, 1929). It is wholly independent of any activity of thought.
Lewis’s a priori conceptual schemes furnish the other end of the spectrum. They are entirely products of the free activity of thought. The a priori and “the given” are wholly independent of each other. Neither limits the other or adds anything to it (Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge p37).

Various answers have been suggested to explain how our conceptual schemes connect with the world of brute fact. Lewis’s answer is decidedly pragmatic: what connects “the given” with a priori conceptual schemes are our human needs and interests.
Along that line Lewis remarked that empirical knowledge is “an interpretation, instigated by need or interest and tested by its consequences in action, which individual minds put upon something confronting them or given to them” (Collected Papers of Clarence Irving Lewis, p241, 1970). Put differently, “the primary and pervasive significance of knowledge lies in its guidance of action: knowing is for the sake of doing” (An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, p3, - C.I. Lewis, 1964). Application of concepts to the given yields empirical knowledge, but this application is not just a product of the given that confronts the reasoner, but also of her aims and interests. Hence, for Lewis, truth is neither wholly found nor a product of the mind.

PRAGMATISM, TRUTH, and VALUATION
Since, for Lewis, knowledge results from successful application of a priori conceptual schemes to “the given”, knowledge is for him always relative to a conceptual system. For Lewis, scientific as well as everyday knowledge is a product of deeply rooted attitudes and interpretative habits of thought. Nothing succeeds like success, and it is the past success of conceptual schemes that guides us in how to understand the world in which we live. The result is a thoroughly pragmatic theory of truth.

On this account, alchemy was not replaced by modern chemistry because alchemy proved to be false (being an a priori system it applies to all possible worlds), but because alchemistic categories and principles have been found not (or no longer) to connect with the given in a manner that serves our purposes. Pragmatists have interpreted this in terms of new truths taking the place of old truths, but Lewis finds it would be more accurate to say that an old interpretation was replaced by a new one. In this process the old interpretation was not discovered to be false, but simply abandoned.

Lewis voices severe criticism of the pragmatism of James and Dewey whom he accused of neglecting the a priori. Because of this, they “seem to put all truth at once at the mercy of experience and within the power of human decision” (Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge p226, - C.I. Lewis, 1929). For Lewis, one does not begin by being a pragmatist, but one begins by construing a priori systems in which one is guided by intellectual motives that go well beyond the practical and the expedient, such as consistency, simplicity, and completeness. Without a well-developed a priori Lewis insisted, the acquisition of knowledge remains a random leap in the dark. Any pragmatism that ignores this aspect of knowledge acquisition, Lewis insists, is no more than “a cheerful form of skepticism" (Ibid p271). For Lewis, it is not in the construction of a priori systems, but only in their application to the given that one is to be a pragmatist. “We must all be pragmatists”, Lewis observes, “but pragmatists in the end, not in the beginning” (Ibid p267).