Early Forms of Metaethical Constructivism in John Dewey's Pragmatism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15173/jhap.v4i9.2868Abstract
This paper demonstrates the innovative character of the approach to metaethics underlying John Dewey’s pragmatism. Dewey's theory of evaluation is contrasted with one of the most dominant contemporary metaethical theses: constructivism. I show that the insistence placed by metaethical constructivists on the actor’s practical point of view, on the rejection of the subjective preferences model, and on a specific form of ethical antirealism and naturalism echoes some of the most crucial claims made by Dewey. This argumentation leads to my main hypothesis: an analysis of Dewey's conception of evaluation allows us to highlight the groundbreaking character of its metaethical approach—an approach that will be characterized as fairly constructivist.
References
Bagnoli, Carla, 2011. “Constructivism in Metaethics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/constructivism-metaethics/, accessed 3 September 2016.
——— ed., 2013. Constructivism in Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Calcaterra, Rosa M., ed., 2011. New Perspectives on Pragmatism and Analytical Philosophy. New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Côté-Vaillancourt, François, 2015. Le constructivisme évaluatif: proposition d’une nouvelle théorie métaéthique. Ph.D. Dissertation, Louvain-la-Neuve, Université catholique de Louvain.
de Waal, Cornelius and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, eds., 2012. The Normative Thought of Charles S. Peirce. New York: Fordham University Press.
Dewey, John, 1978. [MW]. The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, 15 vols. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
——— 1985. [LW]. The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, 17 vols. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dostie Proulx, Pierre-Luc, 2012. Réalisme et vérité – Le débat entre Habermas et Rorty. Paris: Harmattan.
Eames, S. Morris., 2003. Experience and Value: Essays on John Dewey & Pragmatic Naturalism. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 2002. “Dewey on Naturalism, Realism and Science.” Philosophy of Science 69 (S3): S25–S35.
Korsgaard, Christine, 1996. The Sources of Normativity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lenman, James, 2012. Constructivism in Practical Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Liszka, James, 2012. “Charles Peirce on Ethics.” In de Waal and Skowroński (2012), pp. 44–82.
Mayorga, Rosa Maria, 2012. “Peirce’s Moral ‘Realicism’.” In de Waal and Skowroński (2012), pp. 101–24.
Misak, Cheryl, 2000. Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation. New York: Routledge.
——— 2004. Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth. Oxford: Clarendon.
——— 2013. The American Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— 2016. “Pragmatism and the Naturalist Project in Ethics and Politics: Lessons from Peirce, Lewis and Ramsey.” Political Studies Review 14: 7–16.
Nagel, Thomas, 1999. “One-to-One.” London Review of Books 21 (no. 3–4): 3–6.
Parker, Kelly, 1999. Charles S. Peirce on Esthetic and Ethics: A Bibliography. http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/CSP_Bibliography/, accessed 3 September 2016.
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 1931–60. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols., edited by C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss and A. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Railton, Peter, 1986. “Moral Realism.” The Philosophical Review 95: 163–207.
——— 2003. Facts, Values, and Norms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reich, Kersten, 2009. “Constructivism: Diversity of Approaches and Connections with Pragmatism.” In John Dewey: Between Pragmatism and Constructivism, edited by Larry A. Hickman, Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich, pp. 39–64. New York: Fordham University Press.
Santayana, George, 1980. The Life of Reason. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Scanlon, Thomas, 1999. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
——— 2014. Being Realistic About Reasons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Street, Sharon, 2010. “What is Constructivism in Ethics and Metaethics?” Philosophy Compass 5: 363–84.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
The Public Knowledge Project recommends the use of the Creative Commons license. The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy requires authors to agree to a Creative Commons Attribution /Non-commercial license. Authors who publish with the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC license.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
