期刊名称：European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy
电子版ISSN：2036-4091
出版年度：2014
卷号：6
期号：2
出版社：Associazone Pragma
摘要：Debates over the relative priority of experience and language havebeen among some of the most vexed, but also generative, disputes in pragmatistphilosophy over the past few decades. These debates have, however, run into theground such that both positions find themselves at a definitive standstill. I arguefor a rejuvenation of pragmatism by way of moving beyond both the experienceoption (here represented by Dewey) and the linguistic turn in pragmatism (hererepresented by Brandom). We can move beyond these two categories, I argue,by resuscitating the categorical conception that has always been at the heartof pragmatism all along: action or, as I prefer to put it, conduct. In this paper,I develop an argument for “conduct pragmatism” on the basis of a return to WilliamJames’s earliest statements of pragmatism, statements that indeed occur prior to theofficial announcement of “pragmatism” in 1898. I draw on a dispute with CharlesSanders Peirce over the best interpretation of pragmatism as well as on a numberof James’s early psychological writings from the 1880s leading up to the Principlesof Psychology of 1890. These texts definitively establish that the early James waswhat I call a “conduct pragmatist” well before his radical empiricism facilitatedwhat was only a late turn toward the “experience pragmatism” that would cometo impress Dewey and later scholars of classicopragmatism. The early James thusrepresents, I argue, a promising seed for a new third generation of pragmatism thatmay find its way beyond the endings of both experientialism and lingualism, as wellas their impasses with one another.
