Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and Global Citizenship (Larry A. Hickman)

Thefounders of American Pragmatism proposed what they re
garded as a radical alternative to the philosophical methods
and doctrines of their predecessors and contemporaries.1 Although
their central ideas have been understood and applied in some quar
ters, there remain other areas within which they have been neither
appreciated nor appropriated. One of the more pressing of these
areas locates a set of problems of knowledge and valuation related to
global citizenship. Classical American Pragmatism, because its meth
ods are modeled on successes in the technosciences, offers a set of
tools for fostering global citizenship that are more effective than
some of its alternatives. First, Pragmatism claims to discover a strain
of human commonality that trumps the postmodernist emphasis on
difference and discontinuity. Second, when Pragmatism’s theory of
truth is coupled with its moderate version of cultural relativism, the
more skeptical postmodernist version known as ‘‘cognitive’’ relativ
ism is undercut.2
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What is Global Citizenship?
There is scant agreement concerning what constitutes global citizen
ship, and even less regarding what constitutes ‘‘good’’ global citizen
ship. Onora O’Neill, for example, has reminded us that global
citizenship has traditionally been understood as little more than citi
zenship in some nation-state or another that has various relationships
with other nation-states.3 Global citizenship, on this view, amounts
to little more than efforts to influence the ways in which one’s own
national government interacts with the governments of other nation
states. Nation-states are thus viewed as both filters and buffers, isolat
ing individuals from the possibility of direct participation as global
citizens. To many traditionalists, any concept of global citizenship
that expands the role of the individual beyond the limitations im
posed by this model has been regarded as either incoherent or
utopian.
Gradually, however, since the formation of the United Nations and
its adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, this
traditional picture has begun to change. During the last half century,
new institutional frameworks such as agreements and regulatory
mechanisms for trade, the environment, nuclear arms, terrorism,
health issues, and travel have begun to emerge. Add to this a growing
list of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as well as ad hoc in
terest groups capable of organizing themselves rapidly across political
boundaries by means of electronic communication, and it becomes
apparent that the era of the nation-state as we have known it is giving
way to a new, more vigorously cosmopolitan milieu.
These changed and changing circumstances have had the effect of
invigorating debates concerning the nature of global citizenship.
Some critics of the traditional model have argued that the concept of
global citizenship will have to be developed from within the current
structure of nation-states. In this scenario, individual citizens of exist
ing nation-states would work outward from existing conditions with
a view to improving existing or emerging supernational institutions
for international cooperation. In essence, they would form publics
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pragmatism as post-postmodernism
that would demand that their governments participate more actively
in affairs of a global nature.
For other critics of the traditional model, however, this scenario is
far from adequate. They have argued that a new cosmopolitanism will
develop only to the extent that individuals educate themselves about
considerations that transcend their own interests, those of their own
nation-state, and even those of supernational institutions. Unlike the
previous scenario, however, in which individual citizens would work
solely, or for the most part, through their existing national institu
tions, in this model individual citizens would begin to leapfrog their
national governments, as it were, by creating and participating in new
publics of international scope. These new publics would arise from
experienced needs, and, interacting with each other, pressure estab
lished organizational entities such as nation-states to satisfy those
needs.4 (At this time it is difficult to predict how these publics will be
formed, and what form they will take since they have, by definition,
not yet been formed. It may be, however, that currently existing
NGOsand ad hoc interest groups, such as networks of peace activists
organized by the Internet, can offer us some clues about what is to
come.)
There is also an important overlapping question of whether global
citizenship should be defined in terms of the traditional language of
rights and obligations or characterized more broadly, for example,
in terms of the formation of new democratic institutions and
aspirations.
These issues are by any account complicated by the current trend
toward globalization in its economic sense, with its increase of world
trade and attendant expansion of the power of the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, and multinational corporations. Even
further complicating the situation is the current trend toward privati
zation of natural resources, including such basic items as water, as is
now occurring, in some countries of South America.
In the introduction to their excellent collection of essays on the
subject, Nigel Dower and John Williams invite us not to lose sight of
the philosophical issues involved in discussions of the nature of global
pragmatism, postmodernism, global citizenship
33
citizenship and the welter of problems and opportunities that we face
during this transitional period of human history. They organize the
philosophical aspects of this landscape in two components: ethical
and citizenship. In their view, the ethical component includes issues
such as how rights and obligations will be determined and what the
core norms of global citizenship will be. This component would ad
dress issues such as economic and environmental justice, for exam
ple. The citizenship component, in their view, concerns issues such
as whether, as they put it, ‘‘there is a plausible and substantive sense
of ‘citizen’ in which it makes sense to say that we are global citizens.’’5
In what follows, I will attempt to frame the issue of how global
citizenship can be fostered in terms of Dower and William’s citizen
ship component. I will attempt to indicate some of the ways in which
the core methods of classical American Pragmatism are relevant to
creating and cultivating global citizens who can in turn be instrumen
tal to the formation and sustenance of global publics. It will not be
my aim to propose solutions to specific geopolitical and economic
problems. Nor will I attempt to predict the types of global publics
that will be formed or the mechanisms of their formation. Instead, I
will apply some of the methods proposed by the founders of Ameri
can Pragmatism to the issue, with a view to determining where those
methods lead with respect to the education of the global citizen. In
order to present these methods in as high relief as possible, I will first
present them as succinctly as possible. I will then indicate some of the
ways in which I believe them to be more effective than some of the
methods and outlooks generally identified with postmodernism.
The Pragmatic Method
In his Lowell Lectures of 1907, William James offered Pragmatism as
a radical alternative to what he termed ‘‘ultra-rationalist’’ tendencies
in philosophy. Among these tendencies he listed the usual dogmatic
suspects: overreliance on abstractions and verbal solutions, a priori
reasoning, appeal to fixed principles and closed systems, and ‘‘pre
tended absolutes and origins.’’6
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pragmatism as post-postmodernism
At first sight, James’s proposal might have appeared to be just one
more in a long line of offensives mounted by skeptics—moderate as
well as not-so-moderate—against strongholds that have been occu
pied by the likes of scholastics, rationalists, and philosophical system
builders. But what James had in mind was far more radical than any
thing that his fellow empiricists had up to that point been able to put
into play. His indictment of traditional rationalism also included a
barely submerged indictment of traditional empiricism as well.
One of the striking things about James’s proposal is that it did not
anticipate or privilege any special result. It was offered as a method
only—a ticket to ride to wherever the method went. Once the Prag
matic method was applied, James thought, it was sure to undercut
some of the old philosophical antagonisms. In language that went
even beyond the call of Jonathan Edwards for a return to ‘‘naked
ideas’’ unencumbered by the dead weight of parasitic abstractions,
James demanded that every word pay its own way—that it earn its
living within the stream of experience. And he insisted that every the
ory be regarded as an instrument, as a tool for the remodeling of ex
perience. In other words, the Pragmatic method would be flexible
enough to allow for a wide range of viewpoints and activities, de
pending on individual temperament and context. But it would not
accept just any applicant. Though they might live for a time on credit,
ideas submitted to this test would eventually have to either pay their
own bills or declare bankruptcy.
It is worth noting at this point that there is a significant difference
between James’s proposal for a working method that privileges no
particular result, and the proposal issued by Lyotard and other post
modernists that no particular narrative or standpoint can or should
be privileged. James’s proposal possesses the virtues of what has been
termed ‘‘the scientific method’’7 of inquiry (on which it is based):
when it is properly applied, it does present a privileged method with
respect to knowledge-getting, since it is experimental and therefore
produces practical effects that are objective. It is self-correcting. Lyo
tard’s postmodernist proposal, on the other hand, appears to be self
defeating: it must privilege its own announced narrative, namely, that
pragmatism, postmodernism, global citizenship
35
no narrative is privileged. It is also important to keep in mind that
Lyotard’s book does in fact appear to privilege the domain of knowl
edge-getting. Its subtitle is ‘‘A Report on Knowledge.’’
Underscoring his claim that the Pragmatic method privileges no
special result, James borrowed a metaphor from the Italian Pragma
tist Giovanni Papini. The Pragmatic method would be like a corridor
in a hotel, he said. Many rooms would open onto it, and inside those
rooms there would be a wide variety of activities. Religionists as well
as atheists would be found there and scientists as well as philosophers.
Despite their differences, the occupants of the rooms would have one
important thing in common: they would have to pass through the
corridor—they would have to employ the Pragmatic method—to get
in or out of their respective rooms.8
What James was suggesting, therefore, was that cultural, intellec
tual, and political differences, can in many cases be negotiated under
the umbrella of the Pragmatic method. If his view is correct, we
would therefore expect to find in it a tool for fostering global citizen
ship and its corollary, the formation of global publics.
But what, more specifically, is the Pragmatic method? Given that
it privileges no particular result, what is it about that corridor that
allows religionists and atheists to pass, as well as scientists and philos
ophers, but (presumably) not democrats and dictators, secularists
and theocrats, and humanists and fundamentalists? This is a question
that Pragmatism must answer if it is to pay its own way as a set of
tools for fostering global citizenship.
The question is complicated by the fact that now, almost one hun
dred years after James’s Lowell Lectures, and after a period during
which it had precious few friends, Pragmatism appears to have be
come quite fashionable. Despite its current popularity (or perhaps
because of it), however, the central tenets of Pragmatism have not yet
been appropriated in some of the most important arenas of human
life.
Stripped to its most muscular form, Pragmatism is a precise theory
of meaning, truth, and inquiry, or perhaps better put, it is a closely
related family of precise theories of meaning, truth, and inquiry.
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pragmatism as post-postmodernism
Here is Peirce in 1878: ‘‘Consider what effects, that might conceiv
ably have practical bearings we conceive the object of our conception
to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our
conception of the object.’’9 Here is James, twenty years later, in 1898:
‘‘The effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be
brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical
experience, whether active or passive; the point lying rather in the
fact that the experience must be particular, than in the fact that it
must be active.’’10 And here is Dewey in 1938, sixty years after Peirce’s
statement: ‘‘The proper interpretation of ‘pragmatic,’ [involves]
namely the function of consequences as necessary tests of the validity
of propositions, provided these consequences are operationally insti
tuted and are such as to resolve the specific problem evoking the op
erations’’ (LW 12.4).
Put succinctly, the Pragmatic theory of meaning insists that we
treat the whole meaning of a concept not just in terms of its use in a
language game, as Wittgenstein urged us to do, but in terms that are
overtly experimental and behavioral and in ways that transcend par
ticular language games: the meaning of a concept is the difference it
will make within and for our future experience.
Another way of putting this is that the Pragmatic method is experi
mental at its core. Here is Peirce in 1906. ‘‘All Pragmatists will further
agree that their method of ascertaining the meanings of words and
concepts is no other than that experimental method by which all the
successful sciences . . . have reached the degrees of certainty that are
severally proper to them today.’’11
Applying Peirce’s Pragmatic maxim, it seemed to James natural
enough to conclude that since the word ‘‘truth’’ is not otiose, then
it, too, must have a meaning.12 Absorbing the best elements of both
correspondence and coherence theories of truth (as well as rejecting
their less defensible elements) and then adding a temporal dimen
sion, James claimed that ‘‘true ideas are those that we can assimilate,
validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot.’’13
Some who have read this remark have concluded that James
equated truth with personal satisfaction, but Dewey understood the
pragmatism, postmodernism, global citizenship
37
matter differently. James’s real doctrine, he wrote, was, ‘‘A belief is
true when it satisfies both personal needs and the requirements of
objective things’’ (MW 4.112). In his most precise statement of the
matter, Dewey defined truth as warranted assertibility.14
In a word, the Pragmatic theory of truth involves a robust form of
experimentalism: it requires that we regard our ideas as true when
they have both an objective basis (i.e., their warrant can be demon
strated before a candid world) and the capacity to resolve some type
of objective difficulty (i.e., they are assertible under relevant
conditions).
Pragmatism treats inquiry as a natural activity, that is, as intimately
related to organic nature as the beating of a heart and the perches and
f
light of a bird. At the conscious level, inquiry takes its start in situa
tions that are doubtful, from which it seeks to shape well defined
problems. It then uses tools of all sorts, abstract as well as concrete,
to form hypotheses which it tests in the very existential arena from
which the motivating difficulty arose.
In sum, the Pragmatic account of inquiry is invariably situated
with respect to specific circumstances. It arises from felt needs, em
ploys both abstract and concrete tools, tests proposals in the labora
tory of experience, and terminates in the resolution of the difficulties
which occasioned that particular sequence of inquiry. In Dewey’s
book, logic is the theory of inquiry.
Pragmatism and Global Citizenship
What, then, can we say about the Pragmatic accounts of meaning,
truth, and inquiry as they relate to the problems and prospects of
global citizens and global publics?
First, the Pragmatic method claims an experimental basis for its
emphasis on continuity and commonality, thus rejecting the claims
of skeptics, racists, and others that the primary features of human life
are difference, discontinuity and incommensurability.
Of course the Pragmatists did not deny that we experience disrup
tions and discontinuities. It is just that they thought that conjunc
tions and disjunctions are correlative within a broader context. In
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pragmatism as post-postmodernism
what can also be understood as an indictment of the postmodernist
preoccupation with difference (or perhaps diffe´rance),15 James criti
cized traditional empiricism for ‘‘leaving things permanently dis
joined.’’ (It should also be noted that he rejected ‘‘the fictitious
agencies of union’’ that rationalists such as the absolute idealists of
his time had sought to apply as a remedy).16 He suggested that if we
candidly examine our experiences, we will find that they exist in time,
that they include overlapping elements, that they include transitions,
and that their content is both disjunctive and conjunctive.17 For his
part, Dewey’s theory of inquiry was heavily influenced by experi
ments that he and his colleagues at the University of Chicago con
ducted on neural stimulation and inhibition.18
For James and Dewey, in particular, the self is neither the subjec
tive modernist self nor the fragmented and ineffectual self encoun
tered in postmodernist literature. Instead, the Pragmatist self is an
individual that exists as an individual only in relation to the connec
tions and communities that enable it to do so. It is an agent within a
nexus of thick social behaviorist morality, and thus within a nexus of
thick social and political engagement. The Pragmatist self functions
at its best when its activities are based on experimental methods and
outcomes.
Further, because the aesthetic dimension of human experience
plays such an important role within the Pragmatic account of inquiry,
Dewey would doubtless have argued that aesthetic education will
emerge as an essential component of global citizenship, that is, as in
dividual selves prepare themselves for broader participation in the
new global publics.
For Dewey, as for the other Pragmatists, perception is neither pas
sive nor otiose. The new global citizens will be pressed to find ways
of increasing their appreciation of aesthetic diversity of world cul
tures: the sounds of music, the rhythms of speech and gesture, the
scents and flavors of cuisines, and the visual delights of cultural arti
facts from clothing, to architecture, to arts and crafts, to literature.
To the aesthetically educated citizen, all of these factors collaborate in
pragmatism, postmodernism, global citizenship
39
delightful interchange and come together, contributing to a human
commonality that is not fixed and finished, but emergent.
Seen from one end, therefore, the common features of the human
nervous system, having evolved within a common natural environ
ment, provide a platform from which aesthetic diversity can be ap
preciated and appropriated for productive purposes. Seen from the
other end, disruptions and discontinuities are felt aesthetic phases of
sequences of inquiry that are capable of producing enlarged concep
tions of human commonality. Difference and discontinuity are thus
neither primary nor ultimate, but inquirential phases or moments.
Pragmatists have argued that aesthetic education is doubly
grounded. It is grounded within inquiry into aesthetic experience,
and it is grounded within the aesthetic qualities of inquiry as a proc
ess. As to the first, it is worth recalling that Dewey used the term aes
thetic in at least two senses: immediate, uninformed aesthetic delight;
and aesthetic experience that has been experimentally reconstructed
to sustain and secure the otherwise fleeting aesthetic values. It is the
business of the arts to reconstruct such aesthetic moments and to se
cure and sustain them as aesthetic goods.
Second, Dewey and the other Pragmatists argued that all inquiry—
even in rarified areas such as formal logic and mathematics—involves
aesthetic experience. Inquiry begins with a feeling of unease or dissat
isfaction. The inquirer feels the impact of colliding hypotheses, and
concludes his or her work when the originating conditions—
including the feeling of unease that began the inquiry—is replaced by
a feeling of satisfaction. The tools of inquiry, including the aesthetic
aspects of such things as blueprints, laboratory equipment, and even
logical and mathematical notation, can stimulate inquiry and help
bring it to a fruitful conclusion. In short, inquiry takes into account
not only what the moderns regarded as primary qualities, but those
that they regarded as secondary and tertiary as well.
The implications of a Pragmatist aesthetic theory for educating the
new global citizen and providing the bases for the formation of global
publics, therefore, can hardly be overestimated.
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pragmatism as post-postmodernism
As I have already indicated, the Pragmatist call for enlarged and
invigorated aesthetic experience does not entail dismissal or erasure
of difference, but its incorporation into a thick, experimental, social
behaviorist morality and politics. There can perhaps be no better ex
ample of this than Jane Addams’s experiments at Hull House, espe
cially during the 1890s. In her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull
House, Addams provided rich accounts of cases in which she and her
colleagues first achieved a deepened appreciation and respect for dif
ference, then developed that appreciation and respect in ways that
both incorporated and transcended difference, thus creating new, vig
orous communities. As Charlene Haddock Seigfried has reminded us,
‘‘The traits of Dewey’s ideal democratic community—namely, that it
is ‘a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experi
ence’—were actually instantiated at Hull House. It went beyond the
merely physical and organic ‘associated or joint activity [that] is a
condition of the creation of a community’ to embody the moral di
mension necessary to a genuine community, namely, one that . . . is
‘emotionally, intellectually, and consciously sustained.’’’19
Pragmatists such as Jane Addams were thus deeply affected by the
results of their experimental approach to the problems of building
human communities. It should be recalled in this connection that
Addams and Dewey were performing their experiments in Chicago
under very difficult circumstances which included massive immigra
tion of non-English-speakers, labor unrest, and ethnic and racial
strife—in short, under the same sorts of conditions out of which the
new global publics will have to be formed.
It might be objected that one of Dewey’s most formidable experi
mental tools, his evolutionary naturalism, is itself a position that
tends to undercut community, since it divides the supernaturalist
from the naturalist and thus drives a wedge between individuals who
would otherwise be capable of working together to form global pub
lics. To this charge the Pragmatist response would be that James’s
Pragmatic hotel is able to provide rooms for the theist and the atheist,
and it should be added, the naturalist and the supernaturalist as well.
The Pragmatic method, Dewey reminded us, does not offer a method
pragmatism, postmodernism, global citizenship
41
of determining whether god or gods exist. It is a method of examining
the practical consequences of such beliefs. Since it is arguable that a
majority of the world’s population subscribes to some form of super
naturalist religious belief, this is of considerable consequence for
global citizenship.
As a variety of naturalism, Pragmatism has no quarrel with super
naturalism or other religious beliefs per se. As variety of evolutionary
naturalism, however, it does have a quarrel with nonnaturalist ac
counts such as the types of creationism that have been promoted by
Christian fundamentalists as examples of good science and then
urged upon school boards as an alternative to the teaching of objec
tive, peer-reviewed biology and geology.
What this means in practice for the formation of global publics in
these areas is that in terms of the Pragmatic method, naturalists and
supernaturalists should be able to work together to form global pub
lics. But their methods, as well as the methods of other publics, will
have to be experimental ones of the type that are building the interna
tional space station, that discovered the double helix, and that in
vented social security—and not the methods of religious or political
authority.
The application of the Pragmatic method to the education of global
citizens would have consequences both significant and salutary. It
would, for example, reveal the futility of Islamist attempts to return to
a golden age of Arab science in which, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr has
written, ‘‘scientia—human knowledge, is to be regarded as legitimate
and noble only so long as it is subordinated to sapientia—Divine wis
dom.’’20 It would also encourage technoscientists in democratic socie
ties such as the United States to be bolder and more candid, thus
resisting attempts by their governments to co-opt and exploit the re
sults of their research. In short, they would resist attempts to present
political ideology in the guise of good technoscience.
As I write, this is a particularly worrisome problem in the United
States, given the fact that the George W. Bush’s administration has
demonstrated a clear pattern of honoring ideological purity over the
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pragmatism as post-postmodernism
results of technoscientific experiments on such issues as global warm
ing, arctic oil exploration (and even the effectiveness of condoms in
preventing sexually transmitted diseases!).
As Dewey argued in A Common Faith, despite their other differ
ences, human beings share many laudable ideals and goals. He urged
that the Pragmatic method be employed to channel the idealism and
enthusiasm that is found so abundantly within human communi
ties—especially among the young—toward the securing of those
common ideals and goals.
The Pragmatist emphasis on continuity and commonality thus
stands in sharp contrast to the postmodernist claim that there is no
underlying continuity of the self, as well as its emphasis on difference
as a primary feature of human experience. As Ermarth put it, there is
‘‘no common denominator—in ‘nature’ or ‘God’ or ‘the future’—
that guarantees either the One-ness of the world or the possibility of
neutral or objective thought.’’21 Another has informed us that ‘‘now
there are only differences.’’22
In short, Pragmatism provides tools for fostering global citizenship
by indicating some of the ways in which global publics can be formed.
It advances a rich account of aesthetic experience that includes ac
counts of inquiry into aesthetic goods as well as accounts of the aes
thetic components of inquiry as it applies to areas of life in which
the aesthetic is not the dominant concern. As demonstrated by Jane
Addams’s work at Hull House, its experimentalism finds ways of
building communities even among the most diverse populations and
under the most difficult of circumstances. Dewey’s commitment to
evolutionary naturalism stresses the commonalities which can serve
as platforms on which global publics can be formed and from which
they can be launched.
Second, the Pragmatic method has implications with regard to cul
tural conflict, and consequently the problem of relativism. Pragma
tism, as I have characterized it, advances a moderate version of
cultural relativism but rejects a stronger skeptical version known as
cognitive relativism.
pragmatism, postmodernism, global citizenship
43
In accepting a moderate version of cultural relativism Pragmatism
just honors the fact that what various cultures hold as good is much
too rich and varied to be understood or judged in terms of one prin
ciple or one set of principles. In terms of the Pragmatic method, how
ever, this should not be perceived as an effect of the poverty of the
technosciences, but rather as an effect of the richness of human expe
rience. As Dewey put it, there are areas of experience where knowing
has no business.
Following Dewey’s account of inquiry, Pragmatism holds that cul
tural difference per se is not an occasion that calls for inquiry, but
only cultural difference that leads to a situation in which there are
mutually exclusive claims about what is to be done. In other words,
there are areas of experience where knowing does have business.
Cognitive relativism is one response to active cultural conflict.
Here is how the author of an essay published in a 1996 issue of Philo
sophical Forum characterized this view: ‘‘The kind of relativism I wish
to defend here is a very general form of cognitive relativism which
takes as its object judgments in general . . . It is based on two theses:
1) The truth value of all judgments is relative to some particular
standpoint (otherwise variously referred to as a theoretical frame
work, conceptual scheme, perspective, or point of view). 2) No stand
point is uniquely or supremely privileged over all others.’’23
How are we to understand these theses? If the first thesis simply
states that all knowing is perspectival, then it is consistent with Prag
matism as its founders characterized it. Pragmatism emphasizes the
situatedness of organisms within and as a part of their environments,
and rejects the idea of an omniscient stance. Were this not the case,
then human experience would be the poorer in terms of its aesthetic
dimension and much else.
The second thesis is somewhat more complex than the first, but if
it is taken to mean that with respect to judgments in the general sense
all perspectives or standpoints are equally valuable, or even that they
are equally valuable for the solution of specific problems at hand,
then it is inconsistent with the experimental methods of classical
Pragmatism.24
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pragmatism as post-postmodernism
First, the founding Pragmatists rejected the idea that there is any
such thing as judgments or knowledge in general. Second, they
thought that, given a particular situation (which is, after all, what mo
tivates inquiry in the first instance), some judgments are assertible
with warrant and other judgments are not. It is not that the founding
Pragmatists thought that every difficulty had a solution, either now
or in the future. It is rather that they thought that objective inquiry,
if pursued with sufficient vigor, usually tends to render some perspec
tives or standpoints tenable and others untenable.
This position follows from the strong commitment to experimen
talism that is at the heart of Pragmatism. It is worth remembering in
this connection that each of the founding Pragmatists had an inti
mate connection with experimental science from which he developed
a rich notion of inquiry. For much of his career Peirce worked as a
scientist for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. James taught medi
cine and experimental psychology at Harvard University. Dewey and
his work-group at the University of Chicago organized and operated
a laboratory of experimental psychology.
Although it is dangerous to impute motives, it is reasonable to
conclude that the second thesis of cognitive relativism—that ‘‘no
standpoint is uniquely or supremely privileged over all others’’—is
designed to function as an antidote to some of the ideas and practices
that militate against global citizenship. An incomplete list of these
ideas and practices would generally include racism, imperialism, and
the like. More specifically, it would include efforts at ethnic cleansing,
persecution of minorities on religious grounds, and so on. In other
words, the cognitive relativist attempts to avoid being put in the posi
tion of deciding which of two conflicting cultural practices is superior
to the other and so just allows that no standpoint is uniquely or su
premely privileged over all others, thus, it would seem, undercutting
the grounds for conflict.25
But matters are not so simple. It is one thing to hold the view that
no standpoint is privileged over another and therefore that conflict
has no legitimate basis, and quite another to be faced with the diffi
culties of resolving conflicts that are either threatened or already un
derway. In this connection, it is well worth remembering that one of
pragmatism, postmodernism, global citizenship
45
the core features of Pragmatism is its perspectivism. But the Pragma
tist’s perspectivism is the result of limited access; it is not the result
of intellectual promiscuity.
Dewey reminded us that novelty is a generic trait of existence, and
therefore that as far as possible we should prepare ourselves for the
unexpected. But he also reminded us that at any given time we have
at our disposal a fund of well tested working tools. Even more impor
tantly, we have the ability to develop new tools that are even more
appropriate to emerging conditions than the ones we now possess.
These tools can put perceived values to the test with a view to deter
mining which of our alternatives can be sustained as the more
valuable.
Put another way, one of the significant consequences of the Prag
matists’ claim that ideas have consequences (that are operationally
related to the situation or context from which they have come) is that
not all ideas, not all standpoints, are equally valuable. This is not to
deny that what is valued varies across cultures or even that conflicting
statements may be equally valued. It is rather to hold that in many
cases in which there are conflicts regarding what is to be valued, the
Pragmatic method provides the tools by means of which we can de
termine which of the conflicting values can be demonstrated to be
valuable.
In other words, Pragmatism holds that there are methods that are
uniquely privileged if inquiry is to be undertaken (and it is worth
noting that the second thesis of cognitive relativism appears to as
sume that inquiry is involved, since it is a thesis about judgments).
The practice of good global citizenship dictates that we acknowledge
this situation. In short, it is the experimentalism of the Pragmatists,
not the skepticism of the cognitive relativist, that provides the better
grounds for resolving differences that are rooted in conflicting cul
tural practices, and thereby providing the grounds for the formation
of global publics.
It might be objected that the methods that have proven successful
in the technosciences (for those are what are at issue) are privileged
only conditionally, that is, only on the condition that some conflict
46
pragmatism as post-postmodernism
needs to be resolved, but that knowledge is not thereby active every
where within human experience. Fair enough: this was a point that
Dewey made repeatedly and that served to distance his own view
from scientism. Where there is no conflict, there is no need for in
quiry. But global citizenship, like citizenship of less extensive scope,
and global publics, like publics that operate on local, regional, and
national political levels, are precisely responses to the fact of con
f
lict–verbal as well as physical and possible as well as actual. Publics
tend to be formed in response to the recognition of shared problems.
Dewey reminded us that citizenship involves acting in concert with
others, and therefore requires that choices be made. A citizen is some
one who has a part in making, as well as obeying, laws and regula
tions. If no method, perspective, or standpoint is any better than any
other, or if there is no method of knowledge-getting that is any better
than any other, then it is difficult to see how those choices can be
other than local or arbitrary—or even worse, based entirely on self
interest. And as Peirce reminded us, the alternatives to the Pragmatic
method are tenacity, authority, and a priori thinking.
Pragmatism can contribute to the development of global citizen
ship and global publics by advancing its central claims. Among these
claims, as I have indicated, is an insistence that the meaning of a con
cept lies in its consequences for behavior, and therefore that when
a judgment is true then it is one that ‘‘we can assimilate, validate,
corroborate, and verify.’’ Since true judgments are not only war
ranted but assertible, they are habits of action. Even though they are
fallible, until they are successfully challenged they are nevertheless
universalizable (as opposed to absolute or arbitrary). They constitute
rules or habits of action, ready to be employed (even though possibly
improved upon at some future date) when cultural conflicts arise.26
In short, contrary to the position of cognitive relativism, it is possi
ble to have objective results of inquiry that are universalizable across
national and cultural boundaries. (That the results are objective
means that they can be publically objected to through a process of
peer review, and that they are universalizable means that they are
both warranted and assertible until they are successfully challenged.)
pragmatism, postmodernism, global citizenship
47
Global citizenship thus supports the experimental methods of the
technosciences against political and religious attempts to undercut
their methods and results.
Global citizenship demands educated persons—persons who en
gage issues and join with others to form publics that are global in
terms of their interests and outreach. Because the goals of publics
often conflict with one another, global citizenship will require a
strong commitment to experimentalism. It is worth repeating in this
connection that the Pragmatic hotel can accommodate the religionist
and the atheist, but not the naturalist and the fundamentalist. This is
because the primary method of fundamentalism, whether Christian,
Muslim, or Native American, is the method of authority (including
the varieties that privilege divine revelation, textual literalism, and
oral tradition).27 These and other types of fundamentalism have no
mechanism for advancing their agenda short of appeals to authority
or the application of psychological, physical, or political power. Be
cause its methods are experimental, however, and because its empha
sis is on what is assertible with warrant, Pragmatism offers a wealth
of tools for overcoming such conflicts.
It is precisely for this reason that the Pragmatic hotel cannot ac
commodate the democrat and the dictator. The method of the former
is experimental whereas the method of the latter is not: in dictator
ships many voices, many sources of relevant information, are oc
cluded or extinguished. It should also be noted that this result does
not vitiate the claim that the Pragmatic method privileges no special
result. That a result is not the outcome of the application of experi
mental methods does not mean that the result was excluded prior to
the experiment.
In sum, the Pragmatists’ accounts of meaning, truth, and inquiry,
together with their commitment to human community and their
moderate version of cultural relativism, can function as valuable tools
for the fostering of global citizenship and the building of global pub
lics. In order to highlight the effectiveness of these tools, I have con
trasted them to the postmodernist commitment to cognitive
relativism, with its consequent emphasis on difference, discontinuity,
and incommensurability