• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.446-453
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• 2021

This paper deals with two methods regarding fact and value. One is the method of H. Putnam, which is to break the boundary between fact and value and to make a world where the two have an inherent connection. The other is the method of J. Habermas, which regards fact and value as the product of an intersubjective agreement based on argumentation. Putnam, through his position of internal realism, moves from realism to pragmatism, especially by combining the rationalist tradition of Kant and Dewey's pragmatic views. Habermas also stands in the tradition of rationalism and universalism in Kant, at the same time emphasizing the practicability of truth in Hegel's tradition of historical reason. The significance of the strategy of Putnam and Habermas is that they have attempted to revive the realm of value against the strict dichotomy of facts and values and the subsequent devaluation of rationality in the realm of value. The starting point of this attempt is that the practical foundation of rationality is laid on life and practice. This could provide the room for escaping from rationality, which prioritizes only truths that reveal facts, that is, instrument-reduced rationality, the room for the revival of practical rationality through reflection on what is the purpose of life, and, in turn, the room for resisting to pass the realm of values and norms to the logic of habitual routines or customs. However, despite such common goal, there are clear limitations to Putnam's approach due to the differences in the strategies taken on facts and values. Putnam's method can demolish the whole universal framework that is the foundation where pragmatic pluralism will be fostered, eliminating the difference between the specificity of values and the universality of norms and shaking up the status of universal ethics. Therefore, Habermas' ethical theory is proposed as an alternative to establish a basis for universal ethics by relying on communication rationality and to secure the coercion of norms and blossom cultural pluralism as a diverse lifestyle based on this coercion.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.47-64
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• 2010

It is unfair that environmental pragmatism has been regarded as a mouthpiece for industrial expediency and business boosterism. John Dewey's radical pragmatism known as 'Instrumentalism' has provoked ecological fundamentalists' criticism more vehemently than any other pragmatic philosophies. However, most of the presumptive misunderstandings of such critics as Holmes Rolston, J. Baird Calliott, Erich Katz, C. A. Bowers and many others come from their limited or reduced reading of Deweyan pragmatism. The following three aspects of Deweyan pragmatism can work out in opening up a dialogical space with those eco-centrist thinkers mentioned above. First, the concept of Dewey's 'primary experience' can articulate the foundationalist view of nature, which is often found in aboriginal cultures. Second, as Andrew Light points out, ecological essentialism can share its metaphilosophical position with the pragmatist epistemology. While Anthony Weston pursues pluralism, admitting that the foundationalism might be one of the efficient approaches to nature, Eric Katz is also clearly attracted to the metaphilosophical element in Weston's argument that anyone who attempts to claim the 'inherent value' of non-human nature never possibly avoids a pitfall of anthropomorphism. Lastly, in a more comprehensive perspective, Dewey's pragmatism shows a philosophical complexity, what Larry A. Hickman calls 'post-postmodernism.' a dynamic interaction between modernism and postmodernism. Significantly enough, the environmental version of this complexity can procure a meeting ground between foundationalist ecology and the pragmatic view of nature.

• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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• v.120
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• pp.109-130
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• 2011

The main purpose of this paper is to examine Putnam's recent conception of ethics, and show that it gives rise to an ineluctable incoherence with his rationalism. This suggests that Putnam's philosophy has to be far more naturalized to make his new position cogent. Putnam recently has shown some explicit turn toward pragmatism a la James and Dewey under the name of "pragmatic pluralism." Putnam says that traditional ethics has presupposed some form of ontology in one way or another, which he sees is based on an unnecessary pursuit of a misleading conception of objectivity. Putnam tries to get rid of any notion of ontology in ethics, whereby we can talk about a third view which runs between traditional objectivism and nihilistic relativism. In this sense, he defines pragmatism as "fallibilism cum antiskepticism." Putnam's suggestion makes a good sense as far as it goes. However, his continuous transition toward pragmatism is critically impeded by his own adhesion to the normative conception of "reason." In this light, Putnam himself is wobbling between Kant and Dewey, just as he describes ethics is. Dewey's pragmatism does not have recourse to the very notion of reason to secure objectivity necessary to make sense of moral experience. Putnam needs to be far more naturalized to reach cogently where he espouses, and this can be done only by renouncing the normative conception of reason.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.217-247
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• 2012

This essay attempts to read Melville's Moby-Dick as a prefiguration of American pragmatism, especially Jamesian version of it. Underlying this project is the assumption that the American Romance and James's pragmatism partake in the enduring tradition of American thoughts and imagination. Despite the commonality in their roots, the continuity between these two products of American culture has received few critical assessments. The American Romance has rarely been discussed in terms of American pragmatism in part because critics have tended to narrowly define the latter as a kind of relativistic philosophy equivalent to practical instrumentalism, political realism and romantic utilitarianism. Consequently, they have favored literary works in the realistic tradition for their textual analyses, while eschewing a more imaginative genre like the American Romance. My contention is that James's version of pragmatism is a future oriented pluralism which is unable to dispense with the power of imagination and the talent for seeing unforeseen possibilities inherent in nature and culture. James's pragmatism is in tune with the American Romance in that it savours the attractions of alternative possibilities created by the genre in which the imaginary world is imbued with the actual one. The pragmatic impulse in Moby-Dick finds its finest expression in the words and acts of Ishmael. Through this protean narrator, Melville renders the text of Moby-Dick symbolic, fragmentary and thereby pluralistic in its meaning. With his rhetoric of incompletion and by refraining from totalizing what he experiences, Ishmael shuns finality in truth and entices the reader to join his intellectual journey with a non-foundational notion of truth and meaning in view. Ishmael also envisages pragmatists' beliefs that experience is fluid in nature and the universe is in a constant state of becoming. Yet Ishmael as the narrator of Moby-Dick is more functional than foundational.