Pragmatism in a Modern Register

Pragmatism, at least in its classical form as found in James, suggests that we build our world as organisms by reacting to it. To the extent the idea that language is the tool or mechanism for world building (though this is not explicitly found in any explicit form in James or other classical pragmatists) is correct, it would amount to a pragmatic account of language.

This doesn't mean we build our world through language as individuals but as a community of language users, although each individual in the community not only enrolls in the implied world the language characterizes but has a part in elaborating or altering it. By "world" I just mean our notion of a world which is what differentiates our way of experiencing our environment from other creatures lacking language. This has nothing to do with the Tractarian idea that language is essentially depictive although it does not exclude the depictive function. Rather, it recognizes that function as one of the tools in the linguistic tool box but not the only one.

As Robert Brandom has suggested this is contrary to the view Wittgenstein seems to suggest, i.e., it is a claim that assertoric capability (which enables language to refer and, thus, to depict) is essential for language if it is to go beyond mere signaling activity, however complex signaling may become. For assertoric language to occur we need the capacity to infer and imply, i.e., the fundamental rules of logic. Thus language is, as Wittgenstein noted, a panoply of distinct practices we engage in, so-called "language games," many of which consist of complex signaling behaviors, but among those behaviors is the ability to give and assess reasons, something Wittgenstein did not say much, if anything about.

Reasoning makes it possible for us to turn our experiences of wants and needs into valuing, which involves sorting them in order to place them in hierarchies, in order to differentiate them and so navigate about among them. Valuing in this sense is sorting and is thus implied by the construction of a "world" that language enables us to do. To have a world, and not just an environment, we must have language and to be that it must include the capacity for depicting our sensory inputs in discrete ways, as things, places, situations, etc. That is, as a world and not just an endless flow of stimuli. Reasoning and valuing are two sides of this same coin, made possible by the depictive capabilities the assertoric aspect of language enables. Language is thus a pragmatic tool in the human arsenal (and, perhaps, not only human though we have not, as yet, found language, recognizable language that is, in other species on our planet).

As to "how things really are," pragmatism argues that the world we know is a response to our world experienced, i.e., our environment, not a representation of it. Our knowledge of it is subject to the constant correction of the environment if and when that input changes. Our picture of it, linguistically constructed through concept formation, takes form in direct response to those pressures. As Peirce pointed out (and Popper, somewhat later), truth as the idea of what really is, is a target, an ideal which we strive towards but never fully attain though, in his terms, at some theoretical point in the future, we could get there. Until then what we have is conditional, the truth of the moment which is true for us for as long as what we do and say based on it continues to work.

Peirce 's notion of truth as a pragmatic function differs a little from James' but, at bottom, they are largely the same. Both argued that truth (i.e., those claims we deem true) are a function of what we do in response to our environmental inputs. Wittgenstein's notion of language as activity, practices we learn and engage in, fits quite cozily into this notion although Wittgenstein did not take the explicit step of linking his notion of language as behavior, as practice, with the inputs of the world. But, of course, his idea that language has the nature of rule-following, that it is like an assemblage of games (practices), implies feedback from the world in the form of getting the rules right . . . or not.