The Brute Element of Experience as Grounds for Objectivity:

Outline of a Pragmatic Realism

Author: asonosakan
asonosakan@gmail.com
Introduction
The aim of this paper is to outline a specific form of realism. Generally speaking, realism is
a philosophical doctrine that is concerned with the objective dimension of our perceptual experience. For it is none other than in such an objective dimension that we are able to discern
the existence of a world that is not of our making, a reality independent of the idiosyncrasies
of the perspectives upon it. Realism can take different forms depending on how this objective
dimension is construed. The realism I attempt to outline in this paper rejects an absolute dualism between the subjective and objective, or between what would be called beliefs and facts at
the level of particulars.1 It thus stands in stark contrast to the view commonly known as
Metaphysical Realism, which indeed posits such a dualism.2 But it cannot do away with dualism as such, for that would imply collapsing the subjective and objective together into a
single whole. Such is the case of idealism and direct realism, which differ only in regard to
which is collapsed into which. The problem common to both doctrines is that they render unintelligible the possibility of divergence between the subjective and objective, i.e., of cognitive error. Thus subject/object dualism must be retained in a limited sense (to be further explicated).
This kind of realism is by no means new in the history of philosophy. In fact it has a long
and venerable tradition, manifested in the thoughts of figures such as Charles S. Peirce,
George Santayana, Clarence I. Lewis, and more recently, Daniel Dennett. Since this realism
has found its defenders mainly within thinkers associated with the American pragmatist tradition, I shall simply call it Pragmatic Realism. Now, it is true that not all of the enlisted thinkers consider themselves to be working in the pragmatist tradition. Conversely, not all
self-avowed pragmatists hold the view that I call Pragmatic Realism. This is not an important
issue though, for it is a matter of label rather than of substance. As we shall see, the essential
philosophical insight of pragmatism does not necessarily lie in those who proclaim to be
pragmatists. Arthur Lovejoys concluding remarks to his essay Pragmatism versus the Pragmatist is apt today as it was over ninety years ago: Thus the doctrine commonly put forward
as pragmatism may be said to be changeling, substituted almost in the cradle I invite all
1

By dualism I do not intend to denote an ontological doctrine, as in mind-body dualism. I shall use
the term dualism only in an epistemological sense, which is an issue completely independent of ontology. It is entirely plausible for someone to be a mind-body monist and epistemological dualist.
2
I abide by Hilary Putnams definition of Metaphysical Realism as the view which holds that the
world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of the way the world is. Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things (Putnam 1981, p.49).
1

loyal retainers to return to their true allegiance (Lovejoy 1920, pp.80-81).

1. Pragmatism and the Brute Element of Experience
So then, what is the essential philosophical insight of pragmatism? A major tenet of pragmatist philosophy is the idea that knowledge has no absolute foundations. There is nothing
outside of thought to which we can firmly pin our beliefs, for there are no cognitive states
that are basic in the sense that they have a direct contact with reality. Our perceptual experience is theory-laden all the way down. In light of this, pragmatists of an anti-realist persuasion such as William James and Richard Rorty conclude that thought has no rational constraints, and therefore there is no content to the notion of objective truth. As Rorty puts it,
if our awareness of things is always a linguistic affair, if Sellars is right that we
cannot check our language against a non-linguistic awareness, then philosophy
can never be anything more than a discussion of the utility and compatibility of
beliefsand, more particularly, of the various vocabularies in which those beliefs
are formulated. (Rorty 1998, p.127; quoted in Macbeth 2007, p.178)
We do not, however, have to accept this conclusion. From the fact that there is nothing outside of our phenomenal sphere which can impose a rational constraint on our thought, it does
not follow that there are no such rational constraints at all. For they do not have to be outside
of our phenomenal sphere; we can conceive of a rational constraint that manifests itself within
the complex of our perceptual experience. And this is precisely the insight of pragmatism.
In order to specifically elucidate the idea of such a rational constraint, i.e., a rational constraint that does not appeal to anything outside of experience, I would like to highlight a certain line of thought which I believe has not received sufficient attention in the literature, but
without which pragmatism would be indistinguishable from cognitive relativism. I shall call
this line of thought the Brute Element of Experience, by which I understand that element
within perceptual experience which compels us to adopt a certain set of beliefs rather than
another. This element is brute because it cannot be altered or destroyed by our thinking; it
resists certain modes of conceptualization. Resistance may take place in any level of abstraction, from the direct and bodily to the highly theoretical.
Peirce called this the Outward Clash.3 It is also manifested in his notion of the percipuum.4
Commenting on Hegel, Peirce writes: The capital error of Hegel which permeates his whole system
in every part of it is that he almost altogether ignores the Outward Clash [T]his direct consciousness of hitting and of getting hit enters into all cognition and serves to make it mean something real
(CP 8.41). References to Peirces Collected Papers (CP) will be in the form: volume number followed
3

For Santayana it was the experience of shock (Santayana 1923, p.142); for Lewis it was the
thin given of immediacy as opposed to the thick experience of the world of things (Lewis
1929, p.54); for Dennett the idea is manifested in the doctrine of real patterns (Dennett
1991). It is my contention that this idea was a fundamental insight of pragmatism as it was
originally conceived by Peirce, and while it has found inheritors in Santayana, Lewis, and
perhaps a few others, it has been mostly lost in the works of todays neo-pragmatists.5
Now, as I have stated at the outset, the purpose of this paper is to outline a form of Pragmatic Realism, not to delve into textual exegesis. I shall thus avoid scholarly issues of interpretation, and shall make reference to thinkers only where it seems necessary in light of the
overall context. Borrowing the insights of these past (and present) thinkers, my task shall be
to establish that what I call the Brute Element of Experience actually exists, and to show how
it secures a domain of mind-independency without appealing to anything outside of experience. We shall thereby obtain the sort of realism as described at the outset, viz. a view of the
world which rejects an absolutist conception of the objective, but at the same time does justice
to the distinction, so obvious to common sense, between the knower and the known.
2. Real Patterns
In order to illustrate what I mean by the Brute Element of Experience, I would like to first
take up Dennetts conception of real patterns, as summarized in Dennett (1991). There is no
deep reason for this selection; it is simply that the vivacity of Dennetts idea is felicitous for
my purpose.
The topic of Dennetts essay Real Patterns (1991) is ontology. While his argument is
framed in terms of the ontological status of intentional statesbeliefs, desires, and the like,
it is clear that his theory is concerned with the ontology of patterns in general; intentional
states are merely a special case of such patterns. Now, while he does not explicitly state so,
there is enough evidence to assume that Dennett holds that everything is a pattern, i.e., there is
no such entity that is not a pattern. For example, he writes that the principles which apply to
pattern discernment apply not only to the ontology generated by what Wilfrid Sellars calls our
manifest image, i.e., the framework by which we observe and explain our everyday world
(and of which intentional concepts constitute a significant part), but also to the concepts and
by paragraph number.
4
The percipuum is what forces itself upon your acknowledgment, without any why or wherefore,
so that if anybody asks you why you should regard it as appearing so and so, all you can say is, I can't
help it. That is how I see it (CP 7.643).
5
Dennett is an unusual exception; I do not know where he derived his doctrine of real patterns from,
or whether it is an original conception.
3

laws of science (Dennett 1991, p.36). Hence his theory should be conceived as a theory of
ontology in general, and here I shall simply assume that it is true.6
The distinctive feature of patterns is that they are both observer-dependent (in a sense) and
observer-independent (in a different sense). Indeed, it is none other than this two-sidedness
which the term pattern evokes that makes it pertinent in regard to the issue of realism. Patterns are observer-dependent in that their discernment involves an act of interpretation on the
part of the observer. This act of interpretation amounts to the employment, whether conscious
or unconscious, of a certain predictive strategy, or stance, in Dennetts terminology, by which
we attempt to predict the behavior of an object system. For instance, Dennett calls the predictive strategy by which we discern intentional states the intentional stance (Dennett 1987,
p.15). Likewise, we can imagine predictive strategies for just about every conceivable pattern
in the universe: the Newtonian mechanics stance, the cellular biology stance, the Verstehen
sociology stance, etc. The point is that patterns are not simply out there for us to discover; it
is by adopting a certain stance towards an object system that we come to regard it as such.
The confirmation of the existence of a pattern thus inevitably involves an element of activeness on the part of the observer. On the other hand, patterns are observer-independent in that
the facts about the success or failure of their corresponding predictive strategies are perfectly
objective. Herein lies the realness of patterns (hence the title). Dennetts example is inelegant: a pattern is real if you can get rich by betting on it (Dennett 1991, pp.35-36).7 As hard
as we may concentrate, we cannot alter or destroy, by the mere act of our thinking, the facts
about the fecundity of our interpretations. There is thus in pattern discernment a brute element
of Otherness which endows our percepts with a certain objective force.
3. Recalcitrant Experience
The example of recalcitrant experienceexperience which betrays our preformed anticipationsmay be more appropriate in illustrating the Brute Element of Experience than Dennetts example of betting and getting rich. For when we contemplate on what we mean by the
real, we will realize that it is a conception which we must first have had when we discovered that there was an unreal, an illusion; that is, when we first corrected ourselves (CP
5.311), and it is through unexpected, rather than expected, experience that we correct our6

The task of giving a strict proof of this theory shall be left for another occasion. Note that since I am
only using Dennetts notion of real patterns as a way of illustration, my argument will not turn on
whether his theory is true.
7
Dennett gives another criterion for realness in the same paper: a pattern exists in some datais realif there is a description of the data that is more efficient than the bit map, whether or not anyone
can concoct it (Dennett 1991, p.34). The two formulations can be rendered equivalent if by the efficiency of data description we understand the potential for successful prediction.
4

selves.
Consider the following vignette, borrowed from Shaw, Turvey & Mace (1982).8 Two convicts, X and Y, are lost in the desert and are on the verge of dying from thirst. Surveying the
landscape, X gleefully exclaims that he has discovered a lake off in the distance. Y, a thirsty
but avowed philosophical skeptic, disagrees with X, arguing that what they see is merely a
mirage. X, on the other hand, is an optimist who trusts his senses. He springs off into the direction of the watery appearance, and Y has no choice but to follow him.
Both X and Y see an optical display of the sort described. Where they differ is in their interpretation of the image. That is, they hold different beliefs in regard to the same object. Now,
for the sake of argument let us assume that the two convicts are indeed approaching water.
The liquid texture of the lake surface becomes more and more distinct with each step, until
finally the two convicts reach the waters edge. For Y, this is recalcitrant experience. It clashes
with his conviction that the watery image is only a mirage. If Y were a skeptic with common
sense, he would at this point take the new datum into account and revise his former conviction.
But suppose that he were a skeptic of the dogmatic brand. Suppose that he stubbornly denies
that he is convinced. The two convicts step into the lake. They soon find themselves
knee-deep in the cool, refreshing water, splashing and drinking. Still the skeptic holds his
ground. Finally,
Besieged by ill humor and a singular lack of objectivity, the optimist thrusts the
skeptics head under the watery surface, intent upon drowning him unless he
gives some tacit sign of agreement. The skeptic, unresisting to the last and refusing to acknowledge the water by word or deed, alas, drowns. (Shaw, Turvey, and
Mace 1982, p.186)
This is the Brute Element of Experience at its most brute. The gist of this vignette is that
the skeptic has failed to recognize a real pattern in the world. What we should also notice is
that the skeptic had several chances to retract his conviction: the initial stage at which the
8

The context within which this vignette originally appears is the issue of direct vs. representational
realism. While this may seem to be an issue unrelated to the one pursued here, what Shaw, Turvey and
Mace are trying to get at may actually be very close to what I am calling the Brute Element of Experience. For they argue that veritable perceptions derive their truth content from what they call the force
of existence as opposed to the force of argument (Shaw, Turvey, & Mace 1982, p.181), the former being a concept that sharply resembles my Brute Element of Experience. cf. Peirces review of Josiah
Royces Religious Aspect of Philosophy, where he writes: I find myself in a world of forces which act
upon me, and it is they and not the logical transformations of my thought which determine what I shall
ultimately believe (CP 8.45). I should mention, however, that I do not support direct realism as Shaw,
Turvey, and Mace do, for reasons stated in the Introduction of this paper.
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convicts first spotted the watery image, the stage at which they arrived at the lakes edge, the
stage at which they stepped into the lake, etc. For the skeptic, the recalcitrant experience (of
the lake being real) becomes more and more acute with the progression of these stages, until
he is at last devoured by it. What this shows is that the Brute Element of Experience operates
at many levels of abstraction, and as it gets stronger, it descends the ladder of abstractness,
from the theoretical to the direct and bodily. Thus the same uncontrollable element that prevents us from jumping out the window of a five-story building also operates within scientific
inquiry, the only difference being the degree of detachment from immediate sensation.
4. Metaphysical Realism
In the Introduction I wrote that Pragmatic Realism rejects an absolutist conception of the
objective. In what follows I would like to clarify this point, by highlighting the difference
between Pragmatic Realism and the doctrine commonly known as Metaphysical Realism.
As mentioned above in Peirces words, reality is a notion that we must first have had when
we discovered that there was an unreal, when we first corrected ourselves. And such
self-correction must have been induced by a real doubt (which in turn must have been induced
by recalcitrant experience). Now real doubt, as opposed to simply writing that you doubt on a
piece of paper, demands uncritical commitment to some other set of beliefs which are at that
moment not subject to doubt. We cannot set off on our inquiries from a blank state of complete doubt; we must always plunge in media res. The idea that absolute doubt is a philosophical fiction has been one of the major tenets of pragmatist thought since Peirce. And Metaphysical Realism is a child of this philosophical fiction.
To put it simply, Metaphysical Realism is a mirror theory of reality. It is the view that veritable beliefs accurately mirror a state of affairs independent of that belief, and that the world
is the totality of such states of affairs. In this view there is always a possibility, for any given
belief, of divergence from objective fact. Everything we sincerely believe may in reality be
nowhere near the truth. By driving a stake in between our representations and the thing in itself, it makes the latter something utterly unknowable. It is thus easy to see that Metaphysical
Realism is the result of applying the logic of doubt to the world at large. It is a direct amplification of our experience of self-correction to cases where we are not yet induced to genuine
doubt. To reiterate, this kind of absolute dualism between the subjective and objective is untenable, for it is based upon (and therefore implies) the possibility of absolute doubt, which is
a philosophical fiction.
What then, is the Pragmatic Realist alternative? The Pragmatic Realist distinguishes between cases in which we have a genuine reason to set apart objective fact from subjective be6

lief (as in scientists belief in the existence of ether in the 19th century), and cases in which
we dont (as in our belief in the existence of electrons). In other words, in contrast to the
Metaphysical Realist, who presupposes the existence of a subjective series and objective series, each distinct from one another, the Pragmatic Realist holds that the subjective and objective diverge only upon the encounter of cognitive error. In cases in which we have no reason
to suspect the existence of error, belief and fact cannot be distinguished. For belief is not a
stamp that we can affix to and peel off of things at will; it involves a commitment to the subject matter in question. And what impels us to such commitment is none other than that sense
of Otherness within experience, through which real things force themselves on the mind in
such a way that we have no choice but to acknowledge them as we perceive them. In turn,
only the Brute Element of Experience can sway this commitment, and induce the doubt that
will eventually lead to another commitment.
Thus philosophers of science who refuse to accept at face value the scientific discourse on
electrons (on the grounds that they cannot be observed) are not being true to their hearts. Such
philosophers are advised to follow Albert Einsteins dictum (who seems very much to be a
Pragmatic Realist himself):
If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicists about the methods
they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: dont listen to their words,
fix your attention on their deeds. To him who is a discoverer in this field, the
products of his imagination appear so necessary and natural that he regards them,
and would like to have them regarded by others, not as creations of thought but as
given realities. (Einstein 1995, p.270).
Conclusion: Towards a Richer Phenomenology
At the outset I characterized realism as the view that there exists a world that is not of our
making, a reality independent of the idiosyncrasies of the perspectives upon it. I hope that
my illustration of the Brute Element of Experience has been able to show how the existence
of such a mind-independent domain can be established, without falling into the pitfalls of an
absolutist conception of the objective. I would like to conclude with a few remarks concerning the richness of our phenomenal experience, and the methodological and conceptual barriers that may be hindering us from grasping this richness.9
As noted in section 1, the Brute Element of Experience was a fundamental insight of prag-

The following owes much to the argument in Hookway (2008).

7

matism as it was originally conceived by Peirce,10 but has mostly been lost in the works of
todays neo-pragmatists. I believe this is the result of a paradigm shift in philosophical methodology due to the heavy influence of Logical Empiricism on Anglophone philosophy since
the 1940s. The Logical Empiricist conception of experience as flat sense-data conceals the
rich phenomenology inherent in our perceptual experience. On the other hand, reactions
against the foundationalism of Logical Empiricism, which deny the existence of anything
given to mind under the slogan Myth of the Given, are in complicity with their foes, for
they retain the Logical Empiricist conception of the Given, differing only in whether they endorse it or reject it. These thinkers do not possess the sensitivity to phenomenology necessary
to stop and consider whether there may be a cogent conception of the Given, different from
that of the Logical Empiricists. As Hookway (2008, p.271) puts it, they have thrown away
the baby with the bathwater, losing track of deep insights that are contained in the earlier
pragmatist views of experience. Thus even after its alleged demise, Logical Empiricism lives
on in the works of these thinkers. I believe this trend should be amended, if we are to arrive at
a more fruitful conception of reality.
References
Dennett, Daniel C. 1987. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
. 1991. Real Patterns. The Journal of Philosophy 88 (1): pp.27-51.
Einstein, Albert. 1995. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Modern Library.
Hookway, Christopher. 2008. Pragmatism and the Given: C. I. Lewis, Quine, and Peirce. in
The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, ed. Cheryl Misak. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Lewis, Clarence Irving. 1929. Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge.
New York: Charles Scribners Sons.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1920. Pragmatism versus the Pragmatist. in Essays in Critical Realism:
A Co-operative Study of the Problem of Knowledge, ed. Durant Drake. London: Macmillan.
The idea can be said to be manifested in his pragmatic maxim itself: Consider what effects, which
might conceivably 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 (CP 5.402). This is a rule
that tells us to reduce our apprehension of objects to what we conceive would be the counteractive effects of our actions, in situations where the object in question is involved. In other words the pragmatic maxim tells us to reduce our apprehension of objects to conditional sentences: our actions are the
antecedent and the counteractive effects are the consequent. Now the consequent, or the counteractive
effect, is the answer Nature gives in response to our questions, and is the uncontrollable datum upon
which we must construct our theories. Hence it is none other than the Brute Element of Experience.
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Macbeth, Danielle. 2007. Pragmatism and Objective Truth. in New Pragmatists, ed. Cheryl
Misak. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 1 ~ 5, ed. Charles
Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (1931-1935); vol. 6 & 7, ed. Arthur W. Burks (1958). Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Putnam, Hilary. 1981. Reason, Truth, and History. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1998. Philosophical Papers vol. 3: Truth and Progress. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Santayana, George. 1923. Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy. London: Constable.
Shaw, Robert, M. T. Turvey, and William Mace. 1982. Ecological Psychology: The Consequence of a Commitment to Realism. in Cognition and the Symbolic Processes vol. 2,
eds. Walter B. Weimer and David S. Palermo. Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.