Pragmatism is an emergentist version of non-reductive naturalism: subjectivity arises as a natural development of certain kinds of organisms and their interactions with their environment. Subjectivity must be understood dynamically, in relation to action; therefore, pragmatism is a philosophical anthropology, not just a philosophy of mind. Pragmatic naturalism not only avoids scientistic reductions of subjectivity but is compatible with a reconceptualized transcendental perspective on subjectivity; however, the problem of solipsism must not be ignored. Pragmatist philosophy of mind and subjectivity must (...) engage with metaphysical questions about the way the world is for us, in a manner ultimately connected with ethics. (shrink)

This paper examines the metaphysical status of the fact-value entanglement. According to Hilary Putnam, among others, this is a major theme in both classical and recent pragmatism, but its relevance obviously extends beyond pragmatism scholarship. The pragmatic naturalist must make sense of the entanglement thesis within a broadly non-reductively naturalist account of reality. Two rival options for such metaphysics are discussed: values may be claimed to emerge from facts (or normativity from factuality), or fact and value may be considered continuous. (...) Thus, pragmatic naturalism about fact and value may be based on either emergentism or Peircean synechism. This is a crucial tension not only in pragmatist philosophy of value but in pragmatically naturalist metaphysics generally. (shrink)

The tradition of pragmatism has, especially since Dewey, been characterized by a commitment to nonreductive naturalism. The notion of emergence, popular in the early decades of the twentieth century and currently re-emerging as a central concept in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, may be useful in explicating that commitment. The present paper discusses the issue of the reality of emergent properties, drawing particular attention to a pragmatic way of approaching this issue. The reality of emergents can be defended as (...) a pragmatically-useful ontological commitment; hence, pragmatism can be employed as a tool in the debate over the structure and reality of emergence. This strategy of justifying ontological commitments is examined through historical and systematic discussions of the pragmatist tradition. It turns out, among other things, that while classical pragmatists did not specify any technical notion of emergence in the contemporary sense, their non-reductively naturalist views are relevant to the more recent emergence discussions -- especially because they rejected the metaphysical realism typical of today’s ontologically-oriented emergence theories. (shrink)