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According to pragmatism, the meaning of a philosophical topic is found in its implications and consequences for human affairs. Absent is any assumption that the topic represents some aspect of a metaphysical reality inferred to be beyond human experience and behavior. The present review suggests that the views of metaphysics and scientific verbal behavior found in contemporary pragmatism, with Richard Rorty as the example, are compatible with those found in the behavior analysis of B.F. Skinner.
Keywords: antirepresentationalism, levels of analysis, scientific verbal behavior
Pragmatism is a decidedly American viewpoint in philosophy whose development in the late nineteenth century is often attributed to Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey (Menand, 2002), and whose influence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is often attributed to the late Richard Rorty. As is well known, James and Dewey contributed to psychology as well as to philosophy. Indeed, pragmatism was instrumental in the development of American functionalism at the close of the nineteenth century, and is often linked with the development of behaviorism during the twentieth century. In regard to behaviorism, Leigland (1999), Moxley (2001, 2001/2002, 2002), and more recently Schoneberger (2016) have reviewed the relation between pragmatism, for example, as represented by Peirce and Rorty, and the behaviorism of B. F. Skinner, known as behavior analysis. The present paper seeks to continue the discussion of the relation between pragmatism and behavior analysis, and for purposes of illustration to compare the pragmatic dimensions of behavior analysis with those of cognitive science.
Pragmatism as a Philosophical Orientation
Pragmatism has been described in many ways by many commentators, sometimes as much in terms of what it opposes as what it advocates. The following passage from Dewey (1926) is illustrative:
[Philosophy's] primary concern is to clarify, liberate, and extend the goods which inhere in the naturally generated functions of experience. It has no call to generate a world of "reality" de novo, nor to delve into secrets of Being hidden from common sense and science. It has no stock of information or body of knowledge peculiarly its own; if it does not always become ridiculous when it sets up as a rival of science, it is only because a particular philosopher happens to be also, as a...