A True Pragmatist!

As we get deeper and deeper into this book, I'm beginning to like the author's style of argumentation more and more. It seems to me that one of the goals of writing this book is to urge a return to "sound reasoning," whatever that might mean, and reasonable decision-making. The author's arguments are appropriately similar. He presents a position (pragmatism, for example), and shows how that position in its extreme or classical form fails. He then highlights the positive characteristics of a certain position and points out how we as a society can put those positive attributes to good use. It's a very moderate book, and is in some ways dull in its moderation (in a good way, really). Perhaps we're entirely too accustomed to the Ann Coulter types to appreciate an individual who, quite frankly, represents a dose of common sense. I particularly like that he constantly acknowledges the presence of and even describes exceptions to his arguments/"truisms" while still upholding the basic tenets of the argument. 

And a short note on pragmatism.

Most of us were probably exposed to pragmatism as a philosophical idea in high school and were told the old tree-squirrel story. In thinking through this concept, however, I was particularly intrigued by Lynch's objection to classical pragmatism on page 67: "A second important problem for pragmatism is that it can't account for the truth or falsity of some types of propositions at all. The best example is truths of the past." If  "belief is true just when it is pragmatically justified in the long run," than pragmatism calls into question the value of history itself if a certain historical fact simply has no relevance to anything (67). Fascinating!