"Again, makes no sense to me. Scientists make predictions to test their models. Are these models consistent with data? --A meaningful question. Do these models work? --A meaningful question. Do these models accurately represent reality? --Silly metaphysics."
I don't know what makes it silly--the purportedly representational character of belief dominates common-sense _and_ also (I think) philosophical thought. Does it have problems? Sure. If they're insurmountable, I'm pretty sure we're left with skepticism and not the crude pragmatism you advocate:
>>>Suppose we say, in line with the causal thesis, that our beliefs are
caused by considerations of utility rather than by truth or evidence. This
has two important consequences. First, we commit ourselves to the
distinctness of the properties of truth and utility: if our beliefs are
caused by A and not by B, that can only be because A is not B. Second, we
invite the sort of skepticism about belief made famous by Hume in the
eighteenth century.
Hume was struck by the difficulty of substantiating that any particular method that we might use for forming beliefs is the method most likely to lead to true beliefs. After all, he argued, any case that we might make for one of those methods over another would presuppose the integrity of some method, about which a similar question would then arise. It looks as though we will eventually reach a point at which all we can say is: This is simply what we do. Hume concluded that we can have no substantial reason to think that what we believe about the world is true. All that we could be actually doing, in forming some beliefs as opposed to others, is following through on certain brute inclinations or habits.
Pragmatism, construed merely as the causal thesis, adds to this Humean picture only the thought that the brute inclination that controls our beliefs is the inclination to find some beliefs useful in coping with our environment and others not. Interesting as this addition may be, it does not substantially alter the epistemic picture inherited from Hume. We are still portrayed as seeking something--truth--that we cannot hope to claim to achieve, for what our beliefs track is utility, and there seems to be no obvious necessary connection between being useful to us and being true.
Given this reading of pragmatism, it is possible--sort of--to reconstruct how Menand might have come to find his account of its genesis compelling. According to this idea, we are moved to belief neither by truth nor by anything that could be certified to be correlated with truth, but rather by perceptions of utility. If that is the basis for all our beliefs--including our beliefs in moral principles--then it is understandable why, in a case in which we are locked into an irresoluble conflict with some other party, we would be reluctant to impose our view upon them. Since we can have no confidence that our own view has any greater claim to truth than theirs does, with what right would we try to get them to change their mind, let alone force them to do so if they resist?
It is an interesting question why, if Menand has the basic motivation for pragmatism right, any thinker would have needed to invent a new form of skepticism, rather than simply relying on Hume's account. But, putting aside the previously noted reservations, at least the explanation seems to be in the right neighborhood. The trouble is that the causal thesis is not pragmatism. And so Menand's explanation does not explain what he sets out to explain.
In a well-known lecture titled "The Pragmatist Account of Truth," William James, listing the various misunderstandings to which his view had been subjected, arrives at the "Sixth misunderstanding: Pragmatism explains not what truth is, but only how it is arrived at." His reply leaves no doubt as to his intent:
In point of fact it tells us both, tells us what it is incidentally to telling us how it is arrived at--for what is arrived at except just what the truth is?
In this passage, and in many others, James makes it crystal clear that, according to pragmatism, utility is not merely what explains how we arrive at our beliefs, but also--and crucially--what their truth consists in. Indeed, few things could be more inimical to the pragmatist outlook than the gap between truth and what we can actually claim to attain. This is the gap in which skepticism lives.
Pragmatism distinguishes itself from skepticism precisely in its insistence that the useful in the way of belief is not some second-class substitute for the true, something for which we have to settle because we cannot get what we really want. Its whole point, on the contrary, is that there is simply no intelligible goal other than what is useful in the way of belief, no independent substance to calling a belief "true" as opposed to "useful." As James put it elsewhere, "the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief." In other words, pragmatism is not merely the causal thesis, it is the metaphysical thesis as well. It is not just an account of how we arrive at our beliefs, but also an account of what beliefs essentially are. Menand does not seem sufficiently to understand the distinction between the causal claim and the metaphysical claim, and so he sees no need to treat them separately.
[...]
If utility is the property that inclines us to hold a belief and also that which makes the belief true, what is to prevent us from claiming that some belief that is now clearly known to be useful--for example, the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow--is known with certainty? Or consider the committed slaveholder who has come to be persuaded of Jamesian pragmatism. Couldn't he argue that he knows with certitude that owning slaves is a God-given right? After all, he could be as confident as he could possibly wish to be that believing that slave ownership is a God-given right is a useful belief for him to have. And given pragmatism, there is no further open question about whether that belief is true.
[...]
All of this book's problems can be traced to its author's weak command of the philosophical ideas whose history he wishes to recount. This leads him not only to come up with a somewhat fantastical account of pragmatism's origin, but also radically to overestimate its plausibility as a philosophical doctrine.
Intuitively, it seems quite clear that a belief could be as useful as one could wish it to be, and yet be false. The belief that the earth is flat presumably passed the utility test in the Middle Ages. But the earth is not flat. What should we say then, on a pragmatist view? That it was true that the earth was flat in the Middle Ages but that it is no longer true now? But the earth has not changed shape. James tried to deal with this problem with vague talk of a belief's proving useful "in the long run," but he never adequately explained how that is to work, or what "the long run" is. In any event, the maneuver does not sit well with the pragmatist's desire to close the gap between the truth of a belief and what we can actually be seen to be aiming for in coming to believe it: I have no good way now of judging whether a belief currently found useful will also be so judged in the long run.
Indeed, it is hard enough to make a judgment of the current utility of a belief, as Bertrand Russell pointed out in his trenchant attack on James's view in 1908:
Let us consider for a moment what it means to say that a belief "pays." We must suppose that this means that the consequences of entertaining the belief are better than those of rejecting it. In order to know this, we must know what the consequences are of entertaining it and what the consequences are of rejecting it; we must also know what consequences are good, what bad, what consequences are better, what worse. Take, say, belief in the Roman Catholic Faith. This, we may agree, causes a certain amount of happiness at the expense of a certain amount of stupidity and priestly domination.... But then comes the question whether, admitting the effects to be such, they are to be classed as on the whole good or on the whole bad; and this question is one which is so difficult that our test of truth becomes practically useless. It is far easier, it seems to me, to settle the plain question of fact: "Have the Popes always been infallible?" than to settle the question whether the effects of thinking them infallible are on the whole good. Yet this question, of the truth of Roman Catholicism, is just the sort of question that pragmatists consider specially suitable to their method.
Russell's powerful point is that the distinction between truth and utility is clearly visible in the fact that it is often much easier to make a judgment of truth than a judgment of utility.
But there is a deeper point buried in Russell's observation, one that has a more general bearing. In understanding truth to be a function of human utility, pragmatism takes its place in a long line of anti-objectivist conceptions of truth, conceptions that deny that there can be any self-standing facts, and admit only facts that obtain as a result of some judgment on our part. But any such view can be shown to face a very general difficulty, namely, that its own coherence seems to assume the availability of a notion of truth that it cannot hope to capture.
Go back to Russell's question about Roman Catholicism. On a pragmatist view, to figure out whether belief in Roman Catholicism is true requires us to determine what the likely consequences are of holding it, and whether those consequences are on the whole better or worse for us. But a judgment of consequence is just a factual judgment like any other: it is a judgment to the effect that this will accompany that. But to figure out whether happiness and domination are the likely consequences of belief in Roman Catholicism cannot itself be a matter of figuring out whether the likely consequences of believing that those are the likely consequences are themselves better or worse for us, since in that direction lies an infinite regress. To get the pragmatist picture off the ground, then, we need to presuppose the very notion of truth that pragmatism sets out to abolish.
Menand is clearly aware of Russell's criticisms, but he must not have been impressed with them. He mentions Russell only to note that his attacks were so strident that they moved the unflappably mild-mannered John Dewey to remark: "You know, he makes me sore." No doubt Russell did. Menand is also aware--though he is less forthright about the fact--that Peirce would have nothing to do with the equation of truth and utility:
I must confess that I belong to that class of scalawags who purpose, with God's help, to look the truth in the face, whether doing so be conducive to the interests of society or not.
And Menand is also aware that, with the notable exception of Richard Rorty, himself alienated from mainstream philosophy and currently employed by a comparative literature department, pragmatism is rejected by virtually all of the most important philosophers working in the United States today. Yet Menand does not take any of this to reflect on pragmatism's plausibility. In his mind, pragmatism's poor philosophical reputation is a measure only of the doctrine's suitability for academic professionalism. "Efforts within American universities to make the pragmatism of James and Peirce into a research program for philosophy professors," he writes apologetically, "were sidelined by work in philosophical traditions more obviously suited to academic modes of inquiry."
This is all very disappointing; but it is what we have come to expect. In the end, Menand's book is just another depressing document of the immense popularity of anti-objectivist conceptions of truth within vast stretches of the humanities and social sciences. All these varieties of hostility to objectivity would be much easier to take were they not accompanied by such a blithe indifference to the difficulties that have been exposed for them. But perhaps intellectual blitheness is required, for it is difficult to see how an allegiance to these ideas would survive an honest engagement with their substance.
The real problem is to explain why the pragmatist conceptions have achieved such widespread acceptance in our day. One source of their appeal is clear: they are hugely empowering. If we can be said to know up front that any item of knowledge counts as true only because it satisfies some of our contingent social values, then any claim to knowledge can be dispatched if we happen not to share the values on which it allegedly depends. But that only postpones the real questions. Why this fear of knowledge? Whence the need to protect against its deliverances? Those are the questions that we need to understand if we are to command a clear view of what has happened to the contemporary American university.>>>
http://www.tnr.com/091001/boghossian091001_print.html