The paper elaborates the classical pragmatist understanding of cognition as a transformational process. The pragmatists’ emphasis on the situatedness of cognition, on abductive moves and feeling will also be discussed in the light of the contemporary debate on conceptuality and givenism. Our inquiry on a classical pragmatist approach shifts today’s emphasis on knowledge qua justification of belief and suggests ways to transcend the dualism of conceptuality vs. non-conceptuality. Reconsidering the Peircean category of Firstness, Dewey’s quality of situations and Gendlin’s felt (...) sense as subtle tacit moments in cognitive processes enhance a fine-grained and contextualized understanding of cognition in terms of a transformative process. (shrink)

This paper examines a lasting tension in pragmatism between broadly functionalist outlooks on meaning and a primacy placed on what can be revealed by direct experiential or practical encounters. Both the inferentialist and experiential emphases can be traced back to Peirce’s original pragmatic maxim. Here the tension is examined first in William James’s insightful views on intentionality and experience, followed by a diagnosis of the problem as it has arisen in neo­pragmatist debates concerning the nature of perceptual knowledge in Rorty (...) and Brandom and their critics. In the end the paper sketches the general form of a resolution of the tension that is consistent with both of these core emphases in the pragmatist tradition. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy of language has often criticized classical pragmatism for holding to an unwarranted notion of experience which lapses into epistemological foundationalism; defenders of the classics have denied such a consequence. The paper tries to move this debate forward by pointing out that the criticism of the empiricist “given” is not wedded to a specific philosophical method, be it linguistic or pragmatist. From a broader historical perspective drawing in particular on Kant, antifoundationalism turns out to be deeply rooted in modern (...) western philosophy and its ambivalent attitude towards the success of the empirical sciences. This diagnosis allows to reassess classical pragmatism beyond the perceived alternative “language vs. experience”, and to concentrate on antifoundationalism as the real challenge to any modern, epistemologically oriented philosophy. In that perspective, classical pragmatism’s genuine contribution is to do justice to antifoundationalism by focusing on the experimental dynamic of scientific practice, which is most commonly ignored by the analytic tradition. Pragmatism identifies rationality with the practical operation of reflexively determining and articulating what is being experienced. With this approach, it is argued, experiential pragmatism serves modern antifoundationalism ends better than its analytic siblings. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against Terry Pinkard's account of the relation between Deweyian pragmatism and Hegelian idealism. Instead of thinking that their affinity concerns the issue of normative authority, as Pinkard does, I argue that we should trace their affinity to Dewey's appropriation of Hegel's naturalism, especially his theory of habits. Pinkard is not in a position to appreciate this affinity because he misreads Dewey as an instrumentalist, and his social-constructivist account of Hegel – which he shares with Pippin (...) and Brandom, is not able to correctly take the measure of Hegel's naturalism. On my reading, Dewey's philosophy is concerned above all with understanding and making objective the proper relation between reason and habit, with our achieving an equipoise in which thought is informed by intelligent habits and where habits are instituted by past thought and inquiry. In achieving this equipoise, one's bodily nature becomes a form in which subjects can realize their freedom. I claim.. (shrink)

I argue that we find the articulation of a problem concerning bodily agency in the early works of the Merleau-Ponty which he explicates as analogous to what he explicitly calls the problem of perception. The problem of perception is the problem of seeing how we can have the object given in person through it perspectival appearances. The problem concerning bodily agency is the problem of seeing how our bodily movements can be the direct manifestation of a person’s intentions in the (...) world. In both cases what, according to Merleau-Ponty, obscures a recognition of the phenomenon in question is a conception of our bodily capacities, i.e. our sensibility and our motility, which reduces these to the workings of mechanisms that are blind to meaning. I argue that both the problem concerning perception and the problem concerning bodily agency can be properly called transcendental. The problem of perception is transcendental because it concerns the very intelligibility of appearances and judgements with empirical content. The problem of bodily agency is transcendental in the sense that it concerns the very intelligibility of our bodily capacity to carry out intentions and by implication the intelligibility of our intentions as such. (shrink)

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...

The present contribution describes the nature of social practices based on habitual behavior. The first part concerns the notion of “habit” from a perspective that crosses philosophy and science. Habits structure our daily life and possess a social nature, as shown by informally shared habits and institutionalized rituals. After a brief reference to the philosophical debate, we point out the fundamental dimensions of habitual behavior, i.e., routine and goal-directed behavior. They also characterize shared social habits like rituals because we need (...) to: (a) simply follow social institutional practices and (b) actively cooperate to reach a certain goal. Our descriptive strategy aims at promoting the aspect of “control” in habitual behavior, namely, the possibility of accepting or refusing to do something. This control does not work in many pathological cases and cases of auto-illusion. The second part of the article will illustrate the interesting but disregarded case of the epistemic and moral embubblement, explaining it as an individual cognitive process and as a specific social practice that once followed or institutionalized becomes a shared practice routinely performed. The main features of an epistemic bubble concern the widespread situation in which the cognitive agents always resolve the tension between their thinking that they know _P_ and their knowing _P_ in favor of knowing that _P_”. The related case of the moral bubble indicates the situation in which agents are potentially or actually violent and unaware of it. This cognitive process expresses how difficulties in recognizing one’s own violence leads to disregarding the possible or actual inflicted harm: in this case, a process of what can be called “autoimmunity” is at play. We will contend that the concept of moral bubble can provide an integrated and unified perspective able to interpret in a novel way many social practices in which morality and violence are intertwined. (shrink)

Although it is a common claim in the ecological psychology literature that our perception of the environment’s affordances is influenced by socio-cultural norms, an explanation of how this is possible remains to be offered. In this paper, I outline an account of this phenomenon by focusing on the ecological theory of perceptual learning. Two main theses are defended. First, I argue that to account for how socio-cultural norms can influence perception, we must pay attention not only to the education of (...) attention but to the education of intention too. Consequently, I offer some ideas about how intention can be socio-normatively educated. Secondly, I hold that the education of intention occurs via the acquisition of habit-based preferences for particular actions. I claim that once we understand how these habit-based preferences relate to socio-cultural norms, the hypothesis that norms must be represented in the individual’s mind for them to influence affordance perception is no longer needed. If this hypothesis is on the right track, we can have an explanation for how perception can be normatively shaped and direct (non-mediated by internal representations and inferences) at the same time. (shrink)

Hegel’s philosophy of history is fundamentally concerned with how shapes of life collapse and transition into new shapes of life. One of the distinguishing features of Hegel’s concern with how a shape of life falls apart and becomes inadequate is the role that habit plays in the transition. A shape of life is an embodied form of existence for Hegel. The animating concepts of a shape of life are affectively inscribed on subjects through complex cultural processes. This paper examines the (...) argument Hegel puts forward in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History for why civilizations come to atrophy and examines the decisive role habit plays in this process. The paper concludes with a discussion of the way in which the central role of second nature in historical transitions and norm formation conflicts with Brandom’s account of norm formation in Hegel’s thought. (shrink)

Christia (2015) argues that my criticism of Sellars -- that for Sellars, all intentionality is what I call "discursive intentionality" -- relies on a misunderstanding of Sellarsian intuitions (see Sachs 2014). Here I respond to Christias by pointing that that while is correct that Sellars has a distinction between full-blown linguistic intentionality and perceptual takings, Sellars's theory of perceptual takings cannot do justice to the figure/ground structure of embodied perception stressed by Merleau-Ponty.

In this contribution, I refer to a discussion between Jürgen Habermas and Robert Brandom on the latter’s normative pragmatics as advanced in Making it Explicit. Parting with Habermas, I intend to show that though both normative pragmatics and formal pragmatics postulate similar discursive ideals, the former, as compared with the latter, is not a particularly well-calibrated critical tool. I argue that whereas Brandom focuses on making conceptual norms explicit, and takes mutual recognition among participants to a linguistic practice for granted, (...) Habermas proposes a universal frame of reference, which delineates what should be taken as a paradigm case of perception and action, and thus a normative standard according to which all kinds of human endeavors can be judged. Thus construed, the formal frame of reference points to possible perceptual distortions along any of the three dimensions: the subjective, social, and objective worlds. (shrink)

This paper aims to develop a new understanding of normativity based upon the priority of the ordinary. By relying upon diverse sociological and philosophical traditions, the paper seeks to emphasize the ordinary tacit assumptions which provide the basic structure of our experience of the world and its normative features. The general argument is that, whereas sociological traditions of social interactionism shed new light upon the “empirical fact of normativity”, ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism offer a theoretical account of normativity which (...) is consistent with the picture of normativity which emerges out of these empirical descriptions. The paper synthesizes the main achievements of these traditions into a unified account of normativity. (shrink)

Dewey’s social ontology could be characterized as a habit ontology, an ontology of habit qua second nature that offers us an account of intentionality, social statuses, institutions, and norms in terms of habituations. Such an account offers us a promising alternative to contemporary intentionalist and deontic approaches to social ontology such as Searle’s. Furthermore, it could be the basis of a social ontology better suited to explain both the maintenance and the transformation of social reality. In the first part I (...) will characterize Dewey’s model as a social ontology based on the notion of habit, and present it as an alternative to intentionalist approaches to social reality. In the second part I will argue that habit ontology offers us an account of social norms that is based on a peculiar understanding of the notion of ‘status’, and represents an alternative to deontic accounts. In the third part I will claim that Dewey’s notion of “public” offers us a dynamic understanding of social institutions and a ‘reactive’ notion of collective intentionality as an achievement rather than as a presupposition of social practices. In the final section I will summarize some advantages of the Deweyan over the Searlean social ontology concerning our understanding of acceptance, maintenance and transformation of statuses, and of the role played by the ‘background’. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that the meaning and significance of legal evidence is being constituted throughout the course of a singular instance of legal proceedings. This is to be achieved by describing what legal agents _do_ while appealing to different propositions of fact and inferring from them throughout the course of legal proceedings. The authors claim that the process of applying the law is ultimately rooted in the inferential discursive practices of exchanging reasons on the part (...) of the participants of legal proceedings. Therefore, they set forth a model of legal proceedings that consists of an interplay between three types of reasons, which are exchanged by the participants of legal proceedings: i.e. legal reasons, epistemic reasons and stake reasons. To illustrate this interplay, the authors deploy a metaphor of law as a game, and provide a description of legal proceedings as a particular instance of playing a game of law. The conclusion is that the legal concept of evidence is (at least in part) constituted by the role that evidence plays in affecting which reasons for action the participants to legal proceedings choose to act on. The other final assumption of this paper is metatheoretical: authors want to show that when analyzing what legal evidence is, one should begin from the perspective of a singular instance of legal proceedings, rather than from the perspective of law in general. (shrink)