Abstract
Popa investigates the relationship between Collingwood’s metaphysics of absolute presuppositions and pragmatism. She notes that pragmatism is a broad church and that while there are family resemblances between Collingwood and philosophers of a pragmatist orientation, there are also some important differences. Collingwood tends to have in common with all pragmatists a rejection of the correspondence theory of truth. But unlike classical pragmatists, he does not develop a positive theory of truth: his metaphilosophical strategy is to reject the view that absolute presuppositions are truth-evaluable rather than articulate an alternative conception of truth. Collingwood’s rejection of the correspondence theory of truth does not lead to a full-blown deflationary strategy: rather than seeing philosophical problems as fake problems and advocating the end of philosophy, he sees the role of philosophical analysis to be that of making explicit the absolute presuppositions which inform different causal explanations in different contexts of inquiry.
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Notes
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Briefly put, Price argues that while the existence of theoretical entities is proved by their causal interactions, the same move would not hold for causation, since that would be circular.
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This interpretation would bring together An Essay on Metaphysics and The Idea of History.
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An analogy can be drawn here to D’Oro’s comparison between Collingwood’s critique of metaphysics and Carnap’s considerations on the internal/external distinction. Carnap criticizes metaphysics for aiming at answering external questions while questions in general can only be answered within a frame. Collingwood’s view supports this distinction, but shifts the object of metaphysics to the frame itself (D’Oro 2015).
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I am grateful to Giuseppina D’Oro and Karim Dharamsi for comments that helped strengthen this chapter and to Stephen Leach for editorial suggestions.
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Popa, E. (2018). Collingwood, Pragmatism, and Philosophy of Science. In: Dharamsi, K., D'Oro, G., Leach, S. (eds) Collingwood on Philosophical Methodology. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02432-1_6
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