The Sentiment of Pragmatism: From the Pragmatic Maxim to a Pragmatic Faith

ed one from the other only through secondary, theoretical analysis, or to some degree by interrupting the experience. If, for example, one is in terrupted at the moment of doubt, one may not yet be engaged in repairing it, but will, nonetheless, have a penumbral sense that the doubt will not re main unanswered. Restated in a semiotic vocabulary, this means that doubt functions as a sign of the real possibility that repair is at hand. The phenomenology turns, secondly, to the observation that, for those moved by the sentiment, doubt is a sign that the agent of repair is at hand, but as yet unidentified. The experience of observing suffering is somewhat different, since it brings with it the expectation that the observer ought to be the one who helps repair the suffering. In either case, the experience stimulates a process of reparative inquiry. The one who observes suffering is stimulated to engage the sufferer in dialogue: to ask what is wrong and to heed the answer. The one who doubts is stimulated to ask him or herself what is wrong and, if no satisfactory answer is forthcoming, to engage someone else in the dialogue. (Peirce's written accounts develop the dialogic aspect of this process only weakly.) A doubter who turns to another for help functions phenomenologically like a sufferer; from this point on, I will therefore treat the case of suffering as prototypical. The dialogue proceeds on the assumption that the two parties share in some community of practice and that the source of suffering can be traced to some problem in that com munity. Summarized in semiotic terms, suffering (or doubt) is an indexical sign of some problem within the shared community of practice; the meaning of this sign for the observer is that some real possibility of repair is available within the same community. For the observer, the community thus func tions as a collection of both Band A-norms: the former include the prob lematic rules of action that may accompany this case of suffering; the latter will guide any repair of it. In its third stage, the phenomenology examines the abductive ground of reparative dialogue. By definition, the sufferer cannot identify the source of his or her suffering. It is therefore up to the observer/redeemer to offer hypotheses to the sufferer about what may have gone wrong; and it is up to the sufferer to confirm or disconfirm the hypotheses. The strength of these hypotheses will reflect the observer's ingenuity and acquaintance with the sufferer's life in the shared community of practice. The pragmaticist inquiry interrupts the phenomenology at this critical point, since the account of hypothesis-making can no longer remain one of mere description. The phenomenology of suffering-and-repair suggests that the pragmaticist inquiry itself will succeed only to the extent that the pragmaticist can generate workable hypotheses about what went wrong in This content downloaded from 157.55.39.176 on Sat, 09 Apr 2016 06:52:11 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE SENTIMENT OF PRAGMATISM 563 the pragmatists' shared community of practice?specifically, about which B-norms were problematic and which A-norms could guide their repair. PF therefore asks now for an explicit logic of abduction to guide the generation of such hypotheses. 4. The logic of abduction as pragmaticism's logica do cens. Pragmaticism achieves self-reference in its logic of abduction,35 which emerges as the performative product rather than merely the subject of its at tempt to identify rules for repairing broken practices. According to PF, the logic of abduction will indicate how reparative inquiry ought to proceed if the expectations generated by the pragmatic sentiment are not to be disap pointed. Stated in the form of a syllogism, the rule of this logic is simply that, (a) given the fact of doubt or the observation of suffering, (b) if there were such and such a problem in a given community of practice (that is, if a given B-norm were problematic), then the doubt or suffering would follow as a matter or course; (c) hence, subject to inductive testing, there is reason to suspect that there is such a problem.36 According to this rule, the dispute about pragmatism is to be resolved by referring it to an identifiable problem in the pragmatisti community of practice. And, according to PF, the prob lem is simply that for which this rule is a solution: the pragmatists' failure to identify pragmatism with the logic of abduction. Pragmatism represents the claim that inquiry can repair any suffering that stimulates it, and inquiry is defined by its capacity to generate workable hypotheses about how to repair such suffering. For PH, however, the logic of abduction is not self-legitimating. Since the conditions for repairing suffering are not given a priori, the logic of ab duction is useful only contingently. Pragmaticism must therefore find its primary norm outside logic, in whatever rule of communal practice insures that the conditions for repairing suffering will be met?for example, rules that insure the availability of helpers who can generate imaginative solu tions, and so on. PF replies that, for PH, pragmatism is founded in the perception that repair-follows-suffering; completing the previous phenomenology, the logic of abduction simply diagrams this perception.37 Since both foundationalists and historicists lay claim to this perception, the logic of abduction should therefore be normative for both. 5. Ontological and hermeneutical arguments for the validity of a reparative abduction. According to PH, PF conflates logic with the as yet unidentified science that identifies the conditions according to which the logic of abduc tion is normative. I read Peirce's "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" as his attempt to oblige the concerns of PH, but in the interest of a This content downloaded from 157.55.39.176 on Sat, 09 Apr 2016 06:52:11 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms