The Relativist Threat: Pragmatism, Response-dependence and Protagoreanism

Abstract

Pragmatism is famously difficult to define, especially when it extends from Peirce to its more modern forms. This threatens its consistency and gives room to a relativist reading where anything can count as a form of pragmatism. I intend here to examine arguments in favour of a rigorous definition referring to the original 1878 maxim. I show that, in its responsedependant readings, it secures both the specificity and the contemporary relevance of pragmatism. Some resemblance between the responsedependant reading of the pragmatist maxim and the Protagorean dictum resurrects relativist threat within pragmatism thus redefined. But contrary to the first threat, this second has something to it: it fairly recalls that historically, pragmatism was indeed a reaction for “Protagoras rather than Plato” and also considered as a form of anthropocentrism or “humanism”. Philosophically, it addresses a challenge to pragmatism: how can it refuse absolutism and metaphysical realism while not advocating a form of relativism? How can our conceptions both be defined in terms of our dispositions to act on them and have a form of objectivity? The rigidity of definition previously given to pragmatism helps here to distinguish between different kinds of relativist challenges, which deserve to be differently feared and addressed.