In finishing up Sam Harris’ The End of Faith (also see Sam Harris' The End of Faith) I’ll admit I experienced a bit of a disappointment when he took on pragmatism — the philosophical school that got me through, and thankfully out of, my wacky graduate program.
Pragmatism has always offered itself as an alternative to the realist/idealist dyad, and tends to reject the concept that there is a transcendental truth somewhere outside of our ability to perceive the world. Harris concludes that this notion is dangerous in that it can lead to moral relativism and, thus, could lend credence to religious claims that only belief in something “higher” can guarantee moral behavior.
The pragmatist’s basic premise is that, try as we might, the currency of our ideas cannot be placed on the gold standard of correspondence with reality as it is. To call a statement “true” is merely to praise it for how it function in some area of discourse; it is not to say anything about how it relates to the universe at large.
He even ominously — and at the risk of adding a new branch to Godwin’s Law — invokes Osama bin Laden in stating that the terrorist leader’s “favorite philosopher” Sayyid Qutb feels that pragmatism would lead to the “death of American civilization.”
But Harris misrepresents pragmatism, which, I would argue, is actually in support of his — and atheism’s — agenda.
I agree with Harris that moral and epistemological relativism can lead to nihilism. However, the pragmatist notion that a consciousness cannot know an unmediated external “reality” doesn’t necessarily have to lead down that road.
One of the founders of the pragmatic movement, Charles S. Peirce, wrote that we cannot know anything without language (signs). Contra Kant, Peirce claims we have no intuitive knowledge; we can know nothing “a priori.” Even our internal thoughts and emotions are expressed to us via a linguistic process.
Note, however, that a “linguistic process” does not imply any specific language. The linguistic process discussed here closely maps to Saussure’s concept of language as being formulated via a process of differentiation. The elements of a linguistic system, according to Saussure, are signs, which are composed of a mental impression (signifier) and an idea (signified). In order for a consciousness to develop a sign, however, a process must occur in which the mental impression in question is differentiated from all other mental impressions. In other words, language is the process that causes one mental image to become distinct from another.
There is nothing I can think of that makes this clearer than having a child and watching the process first hand as they learn to identify not just objects but their own feelings. The process we, as parents, observe is not simply the acquisition of vocabulary (“that’s a ball, and that’s a fork”) but the acquisition of language which is the necessary first step — learning the concept first that one is a separate entity in the world and then learning that there are differences between things, feelings, people, etc. All that has to happen before one can even begin to apply specific words to those things.
None of this is to say, however, that external reality doesn’t exist. It does mean, however, that truth claims about that reality can only be made by appealing to interpretations of the signs by which reality is represented to our consciousness. Certainly, some pragmatists (like William James) wrote works that could be construed as relativistic, but Peirce was very clear that true beliefs must be verified via a logical (scientific) process. But just because truth, therefore, is mutable given new data or evidence doesn’t mean that Truth (the standards by which truth is derived) is relative.
In The End of Faith, Harris clearly wants to posit direct, unmediated knowledge of reality as a regulative ideal and makes what I feel are dubious claims that mystics (who are not religious) can somehow attain that ideal. Not only do I find this rather strange, but I am annoyed that he chooses to contrast this position by taking pot-shots at a rather reduced version of pragmatism.
