Abstract
Joseph Margolis, who sadly passed away in June 2021, argued for decades, against mainstream forms of realism and antirealism, that the world is “languaged” while our language is “worlded” (e.g., Margolis 1994b, 523; cf. also Margolis 1993b, 323). What this means, in a first approximation, is that reality and the language(s) we use to categorize it are inseparably entangled, and there is no epistemically accessible language- or categorization-independent way the world is, even though the world cannot simply be regarded as a human construction, either. Analogously, the epistemic and the ontological dimensions of the realism issue, as well as realism and idealism as general philosophical perspectives, are deeply integrated. We cannot reach die Welt an sich, but we should not maintain that il n’y a pas de hors-texte, either. As noted in the first three chapters above, all these themes have also come up, with variations, in other pragmatists’ such as Hilary Putnam’s, Robert Brandom’s, and Nicholas Rescher’s work.
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Notes
- 1.
Note, however, that Margolis does not subscribe to “pragmatic idealism” in Nicholas Rescher’s (1992–94) sense. As we saw in Chap. 4 above, Rescher’s idealism is… well, more realistic. A separate discussion would be needed for a detailed study of the similarities and differences of these two pragmatic realism-cum-idealisms. For Margolis’s critical reflections on Rescher, see Margolis 1994c, 2017.
- 2.
Note that I will not discuss in any detail either the historical readings of other philosophers Margolis offers (and there are many of them, as his reflections canvass the entire history of Western philosophy) nor the developments and changes in his own positions (that would be a topic for a monograph rather than a chapter). Indeed, I agree with Margolis (2005, 11) that realism is “the master theme of the whole of modern philosophy”; it would be impossible to capture it in a single chapter.
- 3.
In addition to my essay in the journal (Pihlström 2012b), see my more comprehensive paper on pragmatic realism (Pihlström 2014b), which incorporates the same basic arguments. One might wonder why we should worry about getting Kant right in this context – that is, the context of develo** pragmatism and pragmatic realism and naturalism further in contemporary philosophy. Well, perhaps it doesn’t matter that much. However, Margolis himself says that the “Darwinian effect”, that is, “the import of the bare evolutionary continuum of the animal and human”, yields the “single most important philosophical challenge to Western philosophy since the appearance of Kant’s first Critique” (Margolis 2014b, 5). Insofar as it is pragmatism, especially John Dewey’s naturalistic pragmatism, that takes seriously Darwin’s influence on philosophy, and insofar as pragmatism can thus be seen as a critical synthesis or fusion of Darwinism and Kantianism (cf. Pihlström 2003a), it does seem to matter to our story about how this happens, and how indeed it is possible, whether we get Kant right or not. I am certainly not making any interpretive claims about Kant (or other historical classics) here; what I want to insist on is a certain way of integrating Kantian transcendental idealism into the story about the importance and relevance of pragmatism to the contemporary debate on realism and idealism.
- 4.
See, e.g., Allison 2004 [1983]. I am not saying that Allison is right about Kant, but for a pragmatist Kantian, his reading is helpful and makes it easier to render transcendental idealism compatible with pragmatism. Whether this is in the end a pragmatic virtue of one’s reading of Kant cannot be assessed here.
- 5.
This is what I try to do in Pihlström 2003a. Margolis briefly comments on my effort in his previous book, Pragmatism’s Advantage (Margolis 2010), especially 110–111; see also Margolis 2017. Cf. Margolis 2014b, 6: “[…] there is, then, no principled difference to be made out between ‘transcendental’ discovery and broadly ‘empirical’ conjecture”. From this, however, I would not infer, as Margolis does, that transcendental “demands” would no longer play any “‘constitutive’ role vis-à-vis the cognizable world” (ibid.) but only that they may continue to play that role in a naturalized and pragmatized form. Similarly, I would be happy to reinterpret Kant’s “transcendental dualism regarding autonomy and causality” (ibid., 7) as a compatibilist entanglement: autonomy is part of human nature, seen through Kantian-Darwinian double spectacles. Note, furthermore, that even though I have frequently defended something I like to call “transcendental pragmatism”, this approach significantly differs from the much better-known views of philosophers like Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, who, according to Margolis, are “the final regressive advocates of Kantian fixities among the Frankfurt school” (ibid., 22).
- 6.
Yet, my proposed re-entanglement of the metaphysical and the epistemological at the transcendental level – the level at which constructivism provides a framework for any viable realism – must somehow also accommodate the (re-)entanglement of the transcendental and the empirical. Here I see the real challenge for the current pragmatist who wishes to develop further the insights of naturalized transcendental philosophy and apply them to the realism debate. However that challenge can be met, the pragmatist can certainly agree with Margolis’s “précis”: “[W]e must, as realists, replace representationalism with some form of constructivism; […] we must, again as realists, avoid characterizing reality as itself constructed […] and hold instead that what we construct are only conceptual ‘pictures’ of what we take the real world to be […]; and […] we must acknowledge that the realism thus achieved is itself cognitively dependent on, and embedded in, our constructivist interventions.” (Margolis 2012a, 55.) This can, I think, be offered as a useful characterization of the program of pragmatic realism, insofar as we are able to give up Margolis’s in my view too sharp distinction between (the construction of) reality itself and our pictures of it. When developed in Margolis’s way, pragmatic (constructivist) realism is reflexively conscious of its own status as a human pragmatic posit rather than an imagined God’s-Eye View picture of how things absolutely are.
- 7.
Margolis 2014a and 2014b. He presented early versions of both papers at the conference, Metaphysics of Culture, which was organized in honor of his philosophy at the University of Helsinki in May, 2013. See Grube and Sinclair 2015.
- 8.
I will briefly return to the notion of emergence below. Moreover, note that my disagreement with Margolis is obviously dramatically softened, as he points out that he has no interest in either attacking or defending “‘transcendental’ variants that abandon apriorism – or effectively concede (say, along C.I. Lewis’s lines) that the a priori may simply be an a posteriori posit” (Margolis 2014a, 23); this, clearly, is exactly what my version of naturalized transcendental philosophy seeks to do (though perhaps drop** the word “simply”).
- 9.
This is compatible with admitting that there may be vestiges in Kant of what Margolis (2002, 38) regards as Kant’s “Cartesian” representationalism. For a different critical discussion of Margolis’s own vestiges of Kantianism, focusing on Husserlian transcendental phenomenology rather than Kantianism per se, see Hartimo 2015.
- 10.
For the record, it might be added that for the same reason, it seems to me that Margolis does not pay sufficient attention to the central role played by the philosophy of religion in classical pragmatism. It is, of course, most prominent in James. I discuss pragmatist philosophy of religion in some more detail, also in relation to the realism vs. idealism issue, in Pihlström 2013 and Pihlström 2020a, in particular.
- 11.
At this point Kitcher’s critic (such as, possibly, Margolis?) might argue that while this may suffice to make “intelligible” the realistic thought about the independence of some objects from all of us, it is another matter whether this thought is rendered more plausible than its denial by this argument – or whether the intended contrast between realism and antirealism really makes sense. A critic of (strong) realism like Hilary Putnam would not oppose the idea that in any relevant sense of “independence”, some objects (e.g., stars) are independent of us all and would have existed even if there had never been humans; see, e.g., Putnam’s exchange with Michael Devitt in Baghramian 2013. Moreover, this independence is something that we can intelligibly commit ourselves to only given that we are indeed here to make such a commitment; Kitcher’s critic could maintain that in a world without humans it would make no sense to say that the world is independent of subjects. The pragmatic realist with a constructivist (Kantian) orientation could, hence, still argue that the realist’s “independence” is itself humanly constructed.
- 12.
- 13.
See again Allison 2004 [1983], especially chapters 1–2.
- 14.
See, however, the critical remarks on this concept above.
- 15.
See also Margolis 2000c, focusing on Husserlian phenomenology rather than Peircean realism.
- 16.
It is, again, beyond the scope of this presentation to examine any specific problems in Margolis’s historicist and relativist views. Margolis’s constructivist modification of Peirce’s realism has raised some controversy (which I discuss, referring to Carl Hausman and Douglas Anderson, among others, in Pihlström 2009, chapter 6; cf. Anderson and Hausman 2012).
- 17.
Let me, however, note here that even though I sympathize with most of the things Margolis says about pragmatic realism, historicity, etc., I have some doubts about his at least occasional ontological intolerance toward entities such as universals, propositions, facts, meanings, and thoughts. He seems to regard them as fictions, claiming that these things do not exist. An alternative pragmatic strategy would be to dispense with the univocality of “exist(ence)” and admit that many different kinds of things exist, or are real, in quite different ways, depending on the pragmatic, constructed, historically evolving frameworks within which we regard them as existent. This, indeed, is what Margolis’s reconstruction of Peirce’s realism should, in my view, amount to. It should be noted, furthermore, that Margolis is not alone in his historicist, constructivist doctrine of generality. Tom Rockmore distinguishes, in a related manner, between ahistorical (Platonic) essences or universals and general ideas or “generals”, by which he means “ideas, or concepts, which are not beyond time and place but that derive their cognitive utility from their temporary acceptance at a given time and place” and that are, hence, “mutable, impermanent, malleable, alterable”, “come into being and pass away”. Such historicized generals “emerge from, and remain relative to, the sociohistorical context”. (Rockmore 2000, 54–55, 57–59.) I want to leave to dedicated Peirce scholars the quarrells regarding how close Peirce’s actual position (at different phases of his philosophical development) may have been to the view Margolis proposes. In any event, as Margolis’s reference to the “Kantian-like” symbiosis of subject and object suggests, the critique of metaphysical realism has been an important theme in the Kantian tradition of transcendental philosophy; indeed, the rejection of such realism is the key Kantian theme at the background of the pragmatist tradition.
- 18.
- 19.
See also Margolis 2002, 43, and 2003a, 89. In a somewhat more detailed way, Margolis (ibid., 41) concludes: “(1) every viable realism must be a constructivism (or a constructive realism), in the sense that there can be no principled disjunction between epistemological and metaphysical questions, no neutral analysis of the disjunctive contributions to our science drawn from cognizing subjects and cognized objects; (2) the admission of (1) precludes all necessities de re and de cogitatione; (3) the admission of (1) and (2) disallows any principled disjunction between realism and idealism, as these are defined in the Cartesian tradition […]”. I wonder why the epistemology–metaphysics entanglement is acceptable while the world’s “ontic” construction by us is still denied. In short, I am not convinced we need the category of the (merely) “ontic” at all, if we endorse Margolis’s position. Furthermore, see Margolis’s critique of Putnam’s pragmatic pluralism as insufficiently epistemic (ibid., 105–106; see also Margolis 2003a, 46-48).
- 20.
In a slightly different (Deweyan) context, Margolis (2002, 128) speaks about the constitution and reconstitution of objects and situations. I would again reinterpret this as a process of transcendental constitution in which the practices of resolving (Deweyan) problematic situations play a transcendental role.
- 21.
See especially Margolis 2003a for a devastating critique of scientistic assumptions in twentieth century American philosophy. For a partly Margolis-inspired pragmatist attempt to develop a “cultural naturalist” philosophical anthropology in the spirit of Dewey and Mead, also utilizing the concept of emergence, see Dreon 2022 (discussed in Chap. 1 above).
- 22.
See also, e.g., Margolis 1995, 219.
- 23.
Margolis’s position, while giving us an idea of what a pragmatically understood concept of emergence may look like, is by no means the first pragmatist elaboration on the idea of emergence; on the other hand, emergence theories have never been part of the mainstream orientations of pragmatism, nor vice versa (see, e.g., El-Hani and Pihlström 2002). I have argued elsewhere at some length that the concept of emergence ought to be employed within pragmatism, too (and partly explicated through pragmatism).
- 24.
Margolis frequently claims (and I am tempted to agree) that Rorty’s and Brandom’s attempts to put Sellars’s work to do a pragmatist job fails (see also Chap. 3 above). Sellars, he says, “cannot be made into a pragmatist of any sort (as Rorty and Brandom pretend to do) except by deliberate deformation – which I’m bound to say both are willing to embrace” (Margolis 2003a, 5; see also 107, 142–143). The reason for this, from Margolis’s perspective, is Sellars’s stubborn scientism, according to which “manifest image” entities such as tables and chairs and human persons do not exist in the ontologically privileged “scientific image”.
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Pihlström, S. (2023). “Languaged” World, “Worlded” Language: On Margolis’s Pragmatic Integration of Realism and Idealism. In: Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy. Vienna Circle Institute Library, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28042-9_5
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