Editing Pragmatism (section)

===Naturalism and anti-Cartesianism===
From the outset, pragmatists wanted to reform philosophy and bring it more in line with the scientific method as they understood it. They argued that idealist and realist philosophy had a tendency to present human knowledge as something beyond what science could grasp. They held that these philosophies then resorted either to a phenomenology inspired by Kant or to [[Correspondence theory of truth|correspondence theories of knowledge and truth]].{{Citation needed|date=February 2016}} Pragmatists criticized the former for its [[A priori and a posteriori|a priori]]sm, and the latter because it takes [[Correspondence theory of truth|correspondence]] as an unanalyzable fact. Pragmatism instead tries to explain the relation between knower and known.

In 1868,<ref>{{cite journal |last=Peirce |first=C. S. |date=1868 |title=Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man |journal=[[Journal of Speculative Philosophy]] |volume=2 |issue=2 |pages=103–114 |jstor=25665643 |jstor-access=free |url=http://www.peirce.org/writings/p26.html}} Reprinted in ''Collected Peirce'' v. 5, paragraphs 213–263, ''Writings'' v. 2, pp. 193–211, ''Essential Peirce'' v. 2, pp. 11–27, and elsewhere.</ref> C.S. Peirce argued that there is no power of intuition in the sense of a cognition unconditioned by inference, and no power of introspection, intuitive or otherwise, and that awareness of an internal world is by hypothetical inference from external facts. Introspection and intuition were staple philosophical tools at least since Descartes. He argued that there is no absolutely first cognition in a cognitive process; such a process has its beginning but can always be analyzed into finer cognitive stages. That which we call introspection does not give privileged access to knowledge about the mind—the self is a concept that is derived from our interaction with the external world and not the other way around.<ref>De Waal 2005, pp. 7–10</ref> At the same time he held persistently that pragmatism and epistemology in general could not be derived from principles of psychology understood as a special science:<ref>{{cite journal |last=Kasser |first=Jeff |date=Summer 1999 |title=Peirce's Supposed Psychologism |journal=Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society |volume=35 |issue=3 |pages=501–526 |jstor=40320777 |url=https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/aboutcsp/kasser/psychol.htm}}</ref> what we do think is too different from what we should think; in his "[[Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography#illus|Illustrations of the Logic of Science]]" series, Peirce formulated both pragmatism and principles of statistics as aspects of scientific method in general.<ref>Peirce held that (philosophical) logic is a [[normative]] field, that pragmatism is a method developed in it, and that philosophy, though not deductive or so general as mathematics, still concerns positive phenomena in general, including phenomena of matter and mind, without depending on special experiences or experiments such as those of [[optics]] and [[experimental psychology]], in both of which Peirce was active. See quotes under "[http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/philosophy.html Philosophy]" at the ''Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms''. Peirce also harshly criticized the Cartesian approach of starting from hyperbolic doubts rather than from the combination of established beliefs and genuine doubts. See the opening of his 1868 "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities", ''Journal of Speculative Philosophy'' v. 2, n. 3, pp. 140–157. Reprinted ''Collected Papers'' v. 5, paragraphs 264–317, ''Writings'' v. 2, pp. 211–242, and ''Essential Peirce'' v. 1, pp. 28–55. [http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/conseq/cn-frame.htm Eprint].</ref> This is an important point of disagreement with most other pragmatists, who advocate a more thorough naturalism and psychologism.

Richard Rorty expanded on these and other arguments in ''[[Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature]]'' in which he criticized attempts by many philosophers of science to carve out a space for epistemology that is entirely unrelated to—and sometimes thought of as superior to—the empirical sciences. [[Willard Van Orman Quine|W.V. Quine]], who was instrumental in bringing [[naturalized epistemology]] back into favor with his essay "Epistemology Naturalized",<ref>{{cite book |last=Quine |first=W. V. O. |date=1969 |chapter=Epistemology naturalized |title=Ontological relativity and other essays |series=The John Dewey essays in philosophy |location=New York |publisher=[[Columbia University Press]] |pages=[https://archive.org/details/ontologicalrelat0000quin/page/69 69–90] |isbn=0231033079 |oclc=51301 |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/ontologicalrelat0000quin/page/69 |chapter-url-access=registration}}</ref> also criticized "traditional" epistemology and its "Cartesian dream" of absolute certainty. The dream, he argued, was impossible in practice as well as misguided in theory, because it separates epistemology from scientific inquiry.

[[File:Hilary Putnam.jpg|thumb|right|Hilary Putnam said that the combination of antiskepticism and fallibilism is a central feature of pragmatism.<ref name=Putnam1994/><ref name=Rescher2007/><ref name=Tiercelin2014/>]]