Pragmatism, Naturalism, and Phenomenology

Abstract

Pragmatism's naturalism is inconsistent with the phenomenological tradition's anti-naturalism. This poses a problem for the methodological consistency of phenomenological work in the pragmatist tradition. Solutions such as phenomenologizing naturalism or naturalizing phenomenology have been proposed, but they fail. As a consequence, pragmatists and other naturalists must answer the phenomenological tradition's criticisms of naturalism.A good deal of recent work in the pragmatist tradition purports to be phenomenological in spirit or informed by the insights of phenomenology. 1 In light of the pragmatist tradition's commitment to naturalism and the phenomenological tradition's overt anti-naturalism, the question is whether this cross-traditional work is methodologically coherent. A background question, of course, is whether phenomenology is consistent with any naturalist program in the social sciences. I will argue here that a pragmatic naturalism is committed to epistemic and ontological naturalism and a broad form of humanism. Phenomenology is relevant to pragmatism's humanism, but it is inconsistent with pragmatism's epistemic and ontological naturalisms. As a consequence, pragmatists face a dilemma: either they must reject the essentialist picture of pragmatism as a naturalism or they must reject the phenomenological tradition as antinaturalistic. If they take the first horn of the dilemma, pragmatism as a philosophical method becomes inscrutable. If they take the second horn of the dilemma, for better or worse, pragmatism becomes methodologically isolated from phenomenology, and in turn, that isolation must be attended to more carefully. Further, if the dilemma is right, pragmatists should be bound to answer phenomenologists' criticisms of naturalism, as those criticisms are at least implicitly criticisms of pragmatism. That is, if the reasons behind the phenomenological tradition's anti-naturalism are right, then pragmatism is an incoherent philosophical program.

Embodied cognition and its applications: A brief review

“…The embodied cognition paradigm is arguably founded on two distinct philosophical traditions derived from a blending of continental and pragmatist foundations: naturalism and phenomenology (Johnson, 2006(Johnson, , 2007. Philosophical naturalism asserts that all things in the world, including body and mind, are naturally emergent, as opposed to non-material (Aikin, 2006;Horst, 2002). Subsequently, all explanation should be causal and reducible to the natural (materially manifest) (Aikin, 2006;Johnson, 2006).…”

“…Philosophical naturalism asserts that all things in the world, including body and mind, are naturally emergent, as opposed to non-material (Aikin, 2006;Horst, 2002). Subsequently, all explanation should be causal and reducible to the natural (materially manifest) (Aikin, 2006;Johnson, 2006). Phenomenology, on the other hand, focuses on experiential meaning, and thus derives explanatory propositions from the subjective experience (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2007).…”

The mind-body relationship in psychotherapy: grounded cognition as an explanatory framework

“…As Aikin (2006, p. 326) puts it “Lovers may love, and pains may pain, but the naturalistic perspective can attend only to the lovers, not their love; to the pains, but not their feelings of pain.” Similarly, the phenomenological perspective can attend only to the love, not the lovers and to the feelings of pain rather than the pains. Thus, phenomenologists can provide to naturalists, psychologists and neuroscientists a more precise model of the phenomenon which they attempt to explain than they would if they were to start only with an “objective” scientific theory of cognition (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2007).…”

Embodied Pheno-Pragma-Practice - Phenomenological and Pragmatic Perspectives on Creative "Inter-practice" in Organisations between Habits and Improvisation

“…Although the approaches of phenomenology and pragmatism in many ways differ and divergefor example Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological anti-naturalism, and Dewey's pragmatic naturalism and biological holism and functionalism and experimentalism, poses problems for the methodological consistency (Aikin, 2006) they also converge. Particularly they are similar and comparable in that they share the quest for a return to or a recovery of experienced practice (Rosenthal, 1980).…”