Abstract
This paper views Bernard Williams through the lens of the pragmatist tradition. The central insight of pragmatism is that philosophy must start with human practice, in contrast to high theory or metaphysics. Williams was one of the twentieth century’s most able proponents of this insight, especially when considering the topics of ethics and the law. Williams never saw himself as a pragmatist, because he took Richard Rorty’s radical relativism to be the exemplar of the position. But I shall suggest that had Williams seen himself as a more objective pragmatist, along the lines of C. S. Peirce, C. I. Lewis, or Frank Ramsey, he might have had the resources to settle vital issues on which he wavered, issues having to do with whether there is anything objective underpinning our deliberations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Wittgenstein would not call himself a pragmatist, for he was allergic to any ‘ism’ and thought that one’s philosophy should start from scratch and not link itself to predecessors.
See Misak (2020) for the archival sources and further explanation.
I have argued that this is the case with most of the pragmatists on the subjective end of the pragmatist continuum, although it is beyond the scope of this paper. See Misak (2016).
In the 1980s, Hilary Putnam continued in that classical spirit, urging us to reconsider Dewey’s philosophy and coining the phrase ‘epistemological justification of democracy’. Inquiry, of any kind, must operate on democratic principles: it must provide opportunity and incentive to challenge accepted hypotheses, to criticize evidence and accepted norms, and to offer rival hypotheses. It must respect autonomy and reciprocity (1994, p. 172f). Democratic norms, that is, lie at the heart of inquiry and knowledge. ‘To reject democracy is to reject the idea of being experimental’ (1994, p. 64). Rorty thought that he was wrong—that there is no justification of democracy to be had.
References
Blackburn, Simon. 2015. Apologia pro Vita Sua. In Passions and Projections: Themes from the Philosophy of Simon Blackburn, ed. Robert Johnson and Michael Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Botti, D. 2019. John Rawls and American Pragmatism. Lanham, MD: Lexington.
Dewey, John. 1916. The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 10, 1899–1924: Journal Articles, Essays, and Miscellany Published in the 1916–1917 Period. In The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, John. 1938. The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 12, 1925–1953: 1938, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. In The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953. In The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, 1882–1953. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, John. 1939. The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 13, 1925–1953. Experience and Education, Freedom and Culture, Theory of Valuation, and Essays. In The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, John. 1941. My Philosophy of Law. In My Philosophy of Law: Credos of Sixteen American Scholars, ed. Julius Rosenthal Foundation for General Law, 73–85. Boston: Boston Law Book Co.
Dyzenhaus, David. 1998. Law as Justification: Etienne Mureinik’s Conception of Legal Culture. South African Journal on Human Rights 14: 11–37.
Hart, H. L. A. 1986. Who Can Tell Right from Wrong? In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, New York Review of Books, ed. Bernard Williams. London: Taylor & Francis.
Jeffrey, Stout. 2018. Public Reason and Dialectical Pragmatism. In Pragmatism and Naturalism: Scientific and Social Inquiry after Representationalism, ed. Matthew Bagger, 170–221. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lewis, Clarence Irving. 1923. A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori. Journal of Philosophy 20(7): 169–177.
Misak, Cheryl. 2000. Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation. London: Routledge.
Misak, Cheryl. 2016. Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Misak, Cheryl. 2020. Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Misak, Cheryl, and Huw Price. 2017. The Practical Turn: Pragmatism in Britain in the Long Twentieth Century. Proceedings of the British Academy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mureinik, Etienne. 1994. A Bridge to Where? Introducing the Interim Bill of Rights. South African Journal of Human Rights 10: 31–48.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931–58. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 8 vols. Ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (vols. I–VI), A. Burks (vols. VII–VIII). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. (Cited as volume number: page number).
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1982. The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. Gen. ed. E. Moore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Cited as volume number: page number).
Putnam, Hilary. 1994. Between the New Left and Judaism. In The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn, ed. G. Borradori, 55–69. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Queloz, Matthieu. 2017. Does Philosophy Have a Vindicatory History: Bernard Williams on the History of Philosophy? Studia Philosophica 76: 137–151.
Ramsey, Frank. 1929a [1990]. General Propositions and Causality. Reprinted in Philosophical Papers. Ed. D. H. Mellor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 145–164.
Ramsey, Frank. 1929b [1991]a. Notes on Philosophy, Probability and Mathematics. Ed. M.-C. Galavotti. Naples: Bibliopolis.
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1990. Truth and Freedom: A Reply to Thomas McCarthy. Critical Inquiry 16(3): 633–643.
Rorty, Richard. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope, 103–118. New York: Penguin.
Rorty, Richard. 2010. Reply to Misak. In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. R. Auxier and L.E. Hahn, 44–45. Chicago: Open Court.
Quine, Willard van Orman. 1980 [1951]. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Repr. in From a Logical Point of View. 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 20–46.
Williams, Bernard. 1974 [1981]. Wittgenstein and Idealism. In: Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, Bernard. 1983. Auto-da-Fé, Review of Consequences of Pragmatism by Richard Rorty, New York Review of Books, April 28, 1983.
Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Williams, Bernard. 2002. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Williams, Bernard. 2004. Interview with Bernard Williams. Harvard Review of Philosophy, Xii.
Williams, Bernard. 2005. In The Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorne. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Williams, Bernard. 2007. Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline ed. Adrian Moore. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Acknowledgements
I thank David Dyzenhaus, Matthieu Queloz, an anonymous reviewer for this journal, participants of the University of Toronto Pragmatist Workshop Group, and participants of the Bernard Williams and the Law conference at the London School of Economics, for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Misak, C. Williams, Pragmatism, and the Law. Res Publica 27, 155–170 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-020-09468-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-020-09468-y