Abstract
In the seventh and final session, we returned to the question of what a reappraisal of pragmatism might mean today. We defended the idea that the major relevance of pragmatism lies not in highlighting anti-realist themes - the most common position today, notably among neo-pragmatists such as Robert Brandom and, more recently, Huw Price - but, on the contrary, in affirming the close links that pragmatism, properly understood, has had in the past (notably with Peirce), and must continue to have with realism. It is on this question (realism vs. anti-realism) that the real differences between this or that version of pragmatism are made, as well as on that of the commitment (or not) one makes to metaphysics.
It has been recalled that, in its early days, in the form it took with Peirce, pragmatism presented itself primarily as a method (not a doctrine) of conceptual clarification whose therapeutic ends were exercised on a false interpretation of realism (in the sense of metaphysical realism or Platonism), and was understood from the outset as a semantic, Scotistic realism, even resembling "extreme scholastic realism", fiercely anti-reductionist and advocating the irreducibility and reality of the indeterminate at the logical, physical, epistemological and ontological levels; scientific realism, based on logic and mathematics and implying a strong metaphysical commitment. We have then identified the main elements of what a pragmatist realism, properly understood, could be today: it would be semantic in nature, certainly, not monolithic, attentive to phaneroscopic or categorical analysis, also concerned to avoid idealism (by recalling the externalist, causal and dynamic constraint of the real); not agnostic, positing realism as a necessary explanatory hypothesis, without excluding, due in particular to the strength of semantic, epistemic and ontological indeterminism assumed, certain anti-realist accents ; but a decidedly ontological realism(contra Putnam, for example) which presupposes the establishment of a scientific realist metaphysics (once metaphysics has been "purified") and thus the option for scientific realism (against instrumentalism); and which also advocates the scientific realist's metaphysical commitment (thus dealing not only with truth and reference, but also with the nature of real properties). We concluded with the meaning of such a pragmatism: a certain conception of philosophy and its relationship with science, through a necessary examination of first principles, thus recalling the indispensability of metaphysics, but also a certain idea of the priority of ethics and its aim.
