American Pragmatism has been on the outskirts of my interests for years now, and I have decided that it’s time I try and get a real sense of the tradition, rather than relying on what amounts to vibes. This mostly means going through reading lists and syllabi and drawing up a preliminary survey for myself, I’ll branch out more once I feel as though I have some solid footing. I’ve already worked through a decent bit of Charles S. Peirce and William James. There are some really obvious parallels in the arguments they make to the arguments made by the early analytics (particularly those influenced by Ayer), though the pragmatics have a probably broader conception of verification. I know that the analytics themselves were aware of these parallels (though I think it might have been after the fact), and I know that I’m going to need to read a good intellectual history of the period at some point to try and trace all those similarities and influences.

There are a few other points I’d like to mark down for further research. Peirce has this notion of an ethics of terminology that I think is very interesting, though sticking to my survey reading list hasn’t let me really get into it. What I find provokes my interest is the central idea that we ought to look for ways to establish the terminological grounds of a debate before the debate gets up and going. This is a fairly intuitive idea, and a lot of people seem to hold it, but it seems to me that lots of arguments are about this terminological bedrock and gesturing to “well it depends on what you mean” is basically an abnegation of responsibility. I also really need to get to grips with his use of ‘evolution’, it’s not always clear to me whether he’s using the term as an analogy to describe certain features of the history of philosophy (or science, etc.) or trying to find a naturalistic explanation for that history. This is, quite likely, one of those points that will require further reading into intellectual history for me to clear up!

When it comes to James, I’m sometimes confused by his lack of consistency on some points. His discussion of theological debates, for example, treats them as effectively meaningless as, for him, they make no real difference as to the way we live. But in other places he relativises the relevance of a choice to certain cultural, historical, etc. conditions. It’s not clear to me, that is, why we shouldn’t consider those apparently meaningless theological debates as having a great deal of importance (even if it’s just emotional) in the way the theologians live! It’s something that probably requires a more precise account than the one that he provides, but once we start doing that the edifice starts to look a little shaky.

I’ve also been reading Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books over the last few weeks. They’re surprisingly difficult books, at points. There’s a challenge to tradition and authority in them, but also a kind of conservatism. They sometimes seem to suggest that to genuinely change a culture, etc. you must belong to it first, and I think that that’s a rather fraught notion. I read them, to a large extent, as an exploration of coming to terms with modernity, but I read most books in that way. It might say more about me, than the books I’ve read, that I find myself constantly running into the theme of how difficult it is to shape your own ends and values. The London Review of Books wrote a good review of the novels a few years ago, that can be found here: Eaten by Owls by Michael Wood.

Finally, a term that’s been floating around in my brain recently: antagonistic reading. It seems to me that the best ideas seem to arise from conflict. If we find that our concepts aren’t up to scratch, or are otherwise challenged, we need to adapt them to better fit our circumstances. I’m not quite sure what this means for how and what we should read. It’s not a matter of ‘getting a sense of whether the other side might be right about some things’, but a matter of struggle. Anyway, something for me to think about further.