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Cheryl Misak on Pragmatism

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 Thanks to friend Henry for forwarding me a review of Cheryl Misak's recent book on pragmatism in England.

 I may never obtain the book, but I'll summarize here what the review says it says, and end with a quotation (from the book via review).

The book recounts how, in 1908-09, Bertrand Russell, at Cambridge, developing his own logical atomistic views, took pragmatism to be an American re-working of a familiar foe, the coherence theory of truth distinctive to the Anglo-Hegelians. Russell was quite hostile to the coherence theory, and his view of this new variant of it from across the Atlantic was no more sunny.

 But, beginning with 1914, Russell was adopting pragmatic theses himself. By 1921 he had come around to the quite American understanding of belief itself as a "disposition to act." 

 It was Ramsey, though, not Russell, who made the Cambridge warming to pragmatic winds more official or explicit. For Ramsey, Peirce was THE pragmatist, and a central influence. 

 Misek herself ends up advocating a view that is an amalgam of Peirce and Ramsey. She accepts the identification of belief with habit, i.e. disposition to behave in a particular way. She says that when we evaluate beliefs, our evaluative procedures will be different depending on the content: science; math; ethics, and so on. This allows her to reject the question begging against normative beliefs to which some analytic philosophies lead ("beliefs about 'ought' rather than 'is' don't correspond to anything so they can't definitionally be deemed true."). That sort of question begging set aside, one need not dally with skepticism or relativism, one can understand ethical judgments as aimed at truth in a way appropriate to their context. Thus, one can properly criticism ways of life. 

 Here's a link:

 http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/pragmatism-from-peirce-and-james-to-ramsey-and-wittgenstein/  
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