Arthur Efron

INTRODUCTION: PEPPER'S CONTINUING VALUE
 
 

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[1] Near the end of his life, Stephen Pepper was asked to write something for a book of "personal statements" by American philosophers of the mid-twentieth century. His opening for that essay might well serve as his own introduction:

For as long as I can remember I have had a consuming desire to know about things, about what they really and truly are, and about what makes some things and acts good and others bad. Of course, at first I learned what to think about things from my parents and close surrounding relatives. The answers were direct and authoritative and there was little or no wondering on my part about certain inconsistencies with approved behavior shown by some persons outside the family. Grandma's hired servants, for instance, went to church early in the morning and to a different church from the rest of us in the family.

The first vivid awareness I can remember about possible complexities in the true and the false and the good and the bad came at the age of eight. I had been a rather solitary child. My father was an artist and between the ages of two and eight, except for several visits back to the homes of my grandparents in Maine, I was brought up in Paris. My father was studying there in the art schools. When I was eight my parents returned to America and took up residence in the town of Concord not far from Boston. Then for the first time I was sent to public school and had to learn to get on with a lot of other children.

From my years abroad, I must have seemed a little strange to the other youngsters. There were three little boys in particular who laid for me as I passed by their school building on the way to mine. One evening near tears I told my parents about it. Sweet Aunt Louise was visiting us at the time. My father listened to my troubles and remarked, "Why don't you fight them?" To which Aunt Louise exclaimed, "Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!" This came to me as a perfectly astonishing idea. "But what do I do with my books?" "Put them down on the ground and go for the boys," he said. And he showed me how to double up my fists so as not to sprain my thumb.

Well, this was a totally new insight into the nature of good and bad. I thought I had learned that goodness was the same as kindness. But apparently it was good to be unkind to another if he were unkind to you--and this on father's own authority. This puzzle made a deep impression on my mind. And, let me say, it still does. It unfortunately appears to be a real true ethical principle.

Next morning I went out and put it to test. I happened to be a rather big boy for my age. When the three little boys came out to have their usual fun with me, I laid down my books, clenched my fists (and no doubt my teeth) and prepared to hit them. To my astonishment they disappeared and never bothered me again. Father's principle had worked.

From then on I became more and more critical about more and more things. I found that even the grown-ups did not agree completely about what was really true and good. I had quite a struggle with religion, even though my parents were unusually liberal considering their background. For my grandfather on my father's side was a minister and I admired him greatly as everybody else did. And he had been president of Colby College. But even with all that authority I finally in my college years at Harvard broke away from religious dogma and the church. It just could not be true, and if not true, it could not be really good.

It was not by chance but inevitable that when I discovered philosophy I wanted to make it my profession. For here was a profession whose aim was to find out about the nature of things--the marvelous coincidence of coming upon a job for which I would be paid for doing just what I had the greatest desire to do.¹

[3] The cultural cross-strains of New England and Paris are intriguing. As Pepper goes on with his personal statement, he places the rather severe value of service to others, which came to him through his family's long membership in a northern Baptist church, right alongside his father's profession of painting: "To be creative in the production of things beautiful and true was the highest imaginable service to man."² Pleasure and duty seem reconcilable, but unkindness and goodness do not. These particular oppositions are not categories of Pepper's philosophy, but they point to a feeling of integration finely qualified by an awareness of irreconcilables. This combination would be recreated at various levels in Pepper's writings, as he continued to follow his "consuming desire to know about things..." By all accounts this pursuit was integral to a highly integrated life, but Pepper always left some growing edges and usefully unfinished problems in even his most well rounded philosophical positions. That was a major aspect of integration.

[4] In The Sources of Value, Pepper's longest book, there is in fact a chapter on personality integration. In it, a position is taken on the question of what should count as integration. A personality formed on the basis of repression cannot be considered integrated, however well that person may appear to function, because repression by its very nature means the denial of basic personality features; the re-appearance of these in disguised form is at best a partial integration. While Pepper genuinely values many kinds of partial integration, he classifies repression itself as "disintegrative," and then asks whether it is a cultural necessity. He decides that it is likely that some degree of repression may be necessary in the interest of species survival, but still refuses to allow that therefore repression is a desirable source of value; it remains disintegrative. It would be best if the child could "grow up naturally," with only a minimum of repressions "in quantity and intensity." But "no known societies measure up to this ideal." Instead of remaining at this familiar impasse, however, Pepper's argument becomes a recommendation as well as description: "The favorable environment that is most nearly attained for the development of highly integrated character is that of the child's immediate family."³

[6] All of this argument remains controversial; the use of the term "naturally" seems a provocative acknowledgment of how problematical it may be. The preference expressed in it is one source of Pepper's long journey in aesthetics, value theory, and metaphysics. For one thing, his careful and positive attention to emotion would not even be there if he did not have his confidence in the basic human wishes and needs, which he would prefer to see developed full force rather than remodeled by repressive upbringing. Emotion as an essential aesthetic fact is celebrated at least as early as Modern Color, a book he co-authored with the artist Carl Gordon Cutler in 1923. [See Amy Rosen, "Multicolored Reactions to Pepper's Modern Color," in Paunch 53-54] In his contextualistic approach to aesthetics, given at book length in Aesthetic Quality (1938), the chapter on Emotion begins by stating that "emotion is the very essence of quality."⁴ A decade later, in expounding an alternative aesthetic theory, Pepper included another chapter on Emotion, this time in his book Principles of Art Appreciation. It is very different from the first such chapter, and contains a striking section on "moods," a term denoting emotional gradations from excitement to calm, strength to delicacy.⁵ In the special session of the American Society for Aesthetics held in his honor twenty years later, Pepper again put the problem of the make-up of these moods to his colleagues: moods "are clearly not sensations, and not drive emotions, and not affections ... Yet they are prominently used to unify works of art by the principle of dominant emotion. They are aesthetically indispensable, but difficult to correlate with physiological processes."⁶ The problem has not been solved yet; it seems an unwelcome task in an age of philosophical analysis that usually presumes to get along without physiology.

[7] Emotions are understood by Pepper as more than private in their significance. One statement that brings out their most problematical social meaning is this, from The Sources of Value: "...emotionally charged communal understanding gives a depth and a pervasive significance to life [in primitive societies, peasant communities, in Renaissance Venice and Florence, and in feudal China and Japan] which most people miss in modern industrial civilizations. Can it be recovered in a new, more realistic way free from myth and unwarranted supernatural authority? This is one of the great value problems in modern society."⁷ This same problem is posed more recently by Stanley Diamond, in his book In Search of the Primitive.⁸

[8] Pepper not only theorized about emotions, he kept touch with them, and with feelings, as he performed his philosophical work. He was open enough to say, in his introduction to World Hypotheses --in 1942, when it was not fashionable to make such admissions--that the effort on the part of the logical positivists to do away with metaphysics had drawn his immediate emotional dislike: "My immediate reaction to them was suspicious and hostile. I felt from their attitude and the tone of their statements, even before critically studying them, that they were not meeting the problem that needed to be met. I doubted if many of them had ever fully felt the problem."⁹This is neither a preliminary to a later recantation, nor a write-off that exiles the positivist view from the domain of discussion. By constructing and carrying out his root-metaphor argument in World Hypotheses, Pepper responded to the positivists, and brought out the value latent in his own earlier feeling.

[9] His justification of what he termed the "mechanistic" world hypothesis,* by which he meant, roughly, the British empiricist tradition with its predecessors and successors, hinges upon the way in which that theory can lay hold of a universe that has become systematized, and whose general laws are underwritten by the satisfying feelings that such a world allows. [For Pepper's own late description of the major root metaphors, see "Metaphor in Philosophy," reprinted in this volume. The article by James H. Quina and Lin Alessio gives practical indications of how the categories of each metaphor might be put to use. That article, "World Hypotheses as Methods for Teaching the Humanities in Secondary Schools," may be consulted along with Elmer H. Duncan's "The Philosophy of Stephen C. Pepper: An Appraisal," for a good working knowledge of the world hypotheses, Paunch 53-54] Significant feelings are present when mechanism is expressed in its elegance by Laplace, whom Pepper quotes, just before this comment:

I think no one can fail to see that there is something mechanistically satisfying in this complete systematization of the universe, this rendering of the world a cosmos in truth. It feels right, and anything less than this feels mechanistically like a failure or a frustration. This feeling, I believe, has categorial justification.¹⁰

[10] Feelings and emotions are not dealt with, however, as if they were merely matters of sensibility; they are not "aesthetic" in the polite sense of the word. Instead Pepper connects feelings, emotions, and perceptions as well, with the human body. In his earliest work, the range of body events and problems is not very wide, but it already has an essential function. In a letter written in 1969, Pepper said that the best chapter in his doctoral dissertation, "A Theory of Value in Terms of Stimulus and Response" (Harvard, 1916), was the one showing how scientific procedure depended on data that had been "reduced... from the sense qualities of visual data."¹¹ It is upon such perceptual input that even readings in terms of centimeter, gram, and second finally depend. It takes a human eye to see these data, and were it not for what D. W. Prall called "the aptness of the body,"¹² all scientific efforts would come to naught, since there would be no reason to trust our reading of even the most accurate instrument. In his chapter on "Aesthetic Quality," Pepper similarly notices that the body is essential in "massive" aesthetic experience, such as his own experience of the Hiroshige print discussed in that chapter." [This chapter and the Hiroshige print is reproduced in Paunch 53-54] Here the discussion has widened to include "cables" of intertwined strands of perceptions that are formed through repeated involvement with a given work of art. In a much later statement, the act of looking at a Japanese painting is characterized by such "felt qualities" as "following the dramatic swelling and contracting of a line..."¹³ Such "following" involves feeling, and either is, or is associated with, a feeling of energy movement in the body (kinesthesia). The chapter on "Line," in Principles of Art Appreciation, is premised on the assumption that when line is experienced at all, it is as a body event.¹⁴ This would be hard to explain to anyone who did not already have some grasp of it, a problem that may have something to do with why the concept of line is badly neglected (or so Pepper maintained in 1969) in recent aesthetic theory.¹⁵ 

[11] Emotions in aesthetic experience are not simply recognized as denoted; we have also "whatever satisfaction comes from the emotional responses themselves as they pass through our bodies."¹⁶ The human body also remains a critical factor in all social theory, since there is no literal transference of a, person's "store of energy" in his or her own body, into the body of another, whereas within one's own body, energy may very well be shifted from one interest to another. A human organism is organic in a way society is not.¹⁷ Personality can be correlated with the physiological organism (body includes brain here) to so full a degree that Pepper thought it warranted to regard the physical organism as the "seat" of personality. Moreover, "the whole tone or energy level of the organism affects nearly all dispositions..." This stipulation shows that Pepper's perception of the body is informed by a sense of body energy and its movement.¹⁸

[12] Pepper is not expounding a "philosophy of the body," although he is closer than most of the thinkers credited with that emphasis by philosopher Thomas Hanna.¹⁹ But the entire sweep of Pepper's work proceeds with the assumption of a human body, dynamically conceptualized, as integral. The conclusions he reaches, the methods he develops, are therefore likely to be humanly useful, in a way that would not be true of a philosopher who allowed himself to be absorbed into a mentalistic, a purely analytic, or an emotivist style of thought. Pepper's thought is informed by common sense, personal experience, feelings, emotion, bodily existence. In one of his last articles published in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science -- Pepper discusses the sexual act and orgasm as an instance of his theory of values, and he does this without self-consciousness or technical language.²⁰ Whatever his framework of abstractions, Pepper conveys his "vivid awareness," though often only in the background. He often employed deliberately defused examples for argument, as in the analogy of the shovel applied to the nature of the work of art, or his analyses of two other philosopher's descriptions of a red tomato,²¹ or in his decision to explain a good part of contextualism by analyzing the admittedly trivial sentence, "There will be a period placed at the end of this sentence."²² These and other seemingly dry instances always seem to have a man living a full life behind them. [For comments on Pepper the man, from two people who knew him in the relation of graduate teacher and as colleague, respectively, see the memoirs of Robert L. Armstrong and Wallace I. Matson in Paunch 53-54]

[13] Pepper's achievements in aesthetics have for their context his life-long involvement with the arts and with artists. This again is not a common concurrence, especially among aestheticians who are metaphysicians. As Dewey pointed out, most aesthetics have been constructed to fill a gap in a metaphysical system, simply because the philosopher's system needed that space to be occupied. This hardly gave the arts a fair chance against the paradigm that the philosopher had already built up.²³ Even Dewey, aware though he was, might not have protected himself. He thought he had done so, partly by spending time in the art collection of his friend, Albert C. Barnes, and editing the Journal of the Barnes Foundation, prior to writing Art as Experience in the 1930's. Pepper, however, found that Dewey's old Hegelianism cropped up obtrusively and confusingly in that book, giving it an "organicist" undertow. Pepper later suggested that the Barnes collection-consisting notably of great modern paintings -- may have contributed to the overemphasis on Dewey's part: Dewey "came to an awareness of art late in life under the influence of Barnes and Barnes' magnificent collection of 'modern art,' which did and still does in painting exhibit the organic structure self-consciously and with exceptional power. So, in my opinion, he felt a natural reversion to his old Hegelian insights -- particularly as within a picture the frame kept the organic whole from expanding into the absolute."²⁴

[15] In 1939, as Lewis E. Hahn recalls, Pepper taught an aesthetics course at Berkeley centered on Shakespeare's sonnets, an experience that informed his discussion of how 4 different aesthetic theories would allow us to criticize and appreciate Sonnet #30, at the end of The Basis of Criticism in The Arts (1945).

[16] Much of Pepper's finest philosophical work took place during his 14 years as chairman of the Art Department at Berkeley, 1938-52. According to the painter Erle Loran, Pepper greatly enjoyed the artists and became a friend to almost everyone in the department.²⁷ He was active and effective in bringing artists into academic positions, commenting on their absence in an American Scholar article of 1938, neatly entitled "The Arts Without Artists."²⁸ He showed his support for their needs as artists who would be teaching on campus in another article (1940) pointedly entitled, "How to Fit Universities for Artists."²⁹ Loran recounts Pepper's strategy for overcoming resistance to the Abstract Expressionists who had begun teaching at Berkeley. Worth Ryder had begun around 1930 to "direct the art teaching along progressive and modern paths. Ryder had studied with Hans Hofmann in Munich and actually brought Hofmann for two summer sessions to Berkeley." Because of some bitter opposition to this modern thinking in the Art Department, Pepper founded The Arts Club, with members from English, Music, Philosophy and Art. One object was to form a faculty group to influence the administration in supporting the new teaching. The strategy succeeded.³⁰

[17] Among artists close to Pepper were Loran himself and Glenn Wessels, who was only a few years younqer than Pepper. Wessels took Pepper's advice (and that of the psychologist E. C. Tolman) and went over to the psychology laboratories in order to devise an experiment to answer certain long-standing questions of how we perceive that a visual symbol is "advancing" towards the viewer. Wessels reports that this experiment and others in the same series had a burgeoning effect in the psychology department; he maintains that it was one underlying source for Rudolph Arnheim's Art and Perception. After two years of his lab work in the psychology department, Wessels went to Munich and studied with Hans Hofmann.³¹ 

[18] Pepper was also close to David Park, a painter and neighbor, who only became a department member, however, after Pepper had stepped down as chairman. In 1949, Park took all of his abstract expressionist paintings to the Berkeley dump, and in 1951, shook the Bay Area art world by entering the only representational work in the major annual exhibit. The painting, "Kids' Bikes," won a prize but was considered heretical. Under Park's influence, Richard Diebenkorn for a time moved out of purely Abstract work to painting that was partly figurative.³² That Pepper must have contributed to as well as learned from these developments is shown in his article for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1953), "Is Non-objective Art Superficial?" His answer -- unpopular as it still may be -- is that although such art need not be superficial, it often is. The loss of recognizable referents, with their wealth of associations, cannot be dismissed as a negligible factor within abstract method.

[19] The argument remains controversial. It also shows that Pepper, though fairly soaked in the experience of works of art, and expert in several kinds of aesthetic theory, did not fall into the trap of advocacy for all things aesthetic, nor that of aggrandizement of the aesthetic throughout the subject matter of philosophy. As a metaphysician, Pepper was probably better equipped than anyone else to make aesthetics the be-all and end-all of philosophy. Instead he realized that the two could not be entirely integrated. The late essay on metaphor included here has for its opening sentence the stipulation that metaphor in philosophy is not the same as metaphor in aesthetics.

[20] How seriously Pepper held to a limitation on aesthetic values can be seen in a note to his "Autobiography of an Aesthetics," the address before the A.S.A. of 1969 to which I've already referred. Were there to be "a case of conflict between an aesthetic and an ethical evaluation, in the last analysis the ethical would gain priority," in accordance with the arrangement of values in Concept and Quality. In other words censorship, as Pepper readily admits .³⁴ Probably the most serious disagreement in the correspondence between Pepper and myself occurred over this statement and the issues around it. It appears to me that the positioning and content of the last chapter in Concept and Quality, "Aesthetic Quality," provides good ground for saying that ethical values could never achieve primacy over the aesthetic. "Aesthetic values possess a peculiar depth of significance within our world theory because they are the qualitative values par excellence.³⁵ Or so Pepper had written at the opening of that chapter. But in replies to my objections on the issue of censorship, Pepper maintained that Plato's challenge should not be dodged.³⁶ With some hesitation, he gave the example of TV violence as one area where censorship might be warranted in our society. He stipulated that because any decision to censor would be a most serious problem in social judgment, all 5 of the world hypotheses should be employed before such a decision were arrived at.³⁷ But my reply was that even if this consultation ever should happen to occur, there could not be any government we could trust to make the decision wisely.

[21] The issue has lost none of its bite. It brings out a feature of Pepper's theory of values which has not been given its due: human values can be integrated and reconciled, but not beyond certain limits. Early in The Sources of Value, Pepper argues that G. E. Moore's disclosure of the basic ambiguities in the term "good" could have led not only to Moore's famous effort at resolving this problem through unaided intuition, but toward "an opposite movement, that of accepting 'good' as indeed ambiguous, as a term referring to a collection of natural entities more or less closely connected and requiring only to have their connections discriminated and described. ³⁸ What is most important in this formulation is the humanly apt, but logically messy, sense of values as "a collection of natural entities more or less closely connected..." As The Sources of Value proceeds, "connections" between different orders of values are sometimes "described" in such a way as to indicate their residual incompatibility.

[22] This feature of Pepper's value theory has not been seen very clearly. Working against clarity is Pepper's well-known indebtedness to the value theory of Ralph Barton Perry, who maintained that all human values both could and should be integrated with one another. Certain stubborn values like hatred and personal aggrandizement were silently ushered out the back door of Perry's system under protection of an idealistic blind spot.³⁹ Pepper, as I have said, greatly admired but was also wary of the notion of personality integration. Perry-like statements of his can be quoted, but they do not fit the actual argument of The Sources of Value. Pepper states flatly in fact that there will never be a complete congruence between the values of the individual and of society, or in our terms, between the selection of acts made in life-space and the selections made in a social situation. The two systems will never completely coincide. And that is why man will always have to consider the peculiar ethical problem of which of these selective systems will legislate over the other and under what conditions."⁴⁰ From this point, after establishing that there is a "gap" between what a person will do to look out for his own interests, and what the same person will be disposed to do for the interests of society in general,⁴¹ Pepper goes on to deal with how this tension between two different sources of value can be mediated.

[23] The argument was criticized, in the most serious critique of The Sources of Value, by Abraham Edel, for creating an unnecessary gap between individual and society.⁴² In effect, Pepper had rejected not only Perry's assumption that there is no such gap, but also the various Marxist and Deweyan stipulations that it is only a delusion of capitalist society. At the same time (and this was not enough noticed) Pepper is also rejecting the resigned, tragic position exemplified by Isaiah Berlin, who has argued that the gap is finally unbridgeable: basically, there are two incompatible kinds of freedom, a negative one under which a person is permitted to do anything whatever (within whatever limits surrounding this area), and a positive kind, which is premised on rational, true values and their enforcement for the good of all by some. Berlin at his end of the spectrum sounds as noble as Perry: we must be courageous in our realization that never shall the concepts of freedom meet, and we must make our choice -- for the negative kind.⁴³ But in Pepper's approach, the various "selective systems" in which people choose and carry out their values are neither at absolute loggers' heads with one another (the individual versus the social) nor do they exist in some all-but-visible harmony (the individual identical with the social). We simply have to work from there if we expect to gain under standing. Pepper argued for an "adjustable society," in which reliance is placed neither on the institutionally permanent handing over of power from individuals to central authority, nor in the retention of all powers in the hands of individuals alone. Control would shift back and forth depending on what people really needed at a given time. His argument that group survival and individual freedom can be brought into alignment is a contribution to a problem of common experience, but it is not a claim that we already know how to solve that problem nor even a promise that some day we will. It does help with knowing what questions to ask, when there already is a problem. The ethical dilemmas proposed in Elmer Duncan's essay, of the young man caught between his pacifist values and his society's survival values, and of the young woman caught between her desire for personal freedom and the mores of her family ["The Philosophy of Stephen C. Pepper," Paunch 53-54], might be approached in Pepper's theory of values by asking first, whether the society is actually threatened or if it just claims to be, and if the woman's choice of leaving home (even were it multiplied by thousands or millions of other women doing the same) to follow her own ways, will actually threaten social existence - or will it help to eliminate a "cultural lag" in sexual ethics? These questions do not magically dissolve an impasse in which conflict has already been hardened into fine-hammered steel, but they re useful up to any point just short of that, and may even suggest that the steel is not as hard-set as had first appeared to the participants in the struggle.

[24] Pepper is tendentiously interested in the "sources" of value, because if we start with understanding how values are selected, carried out and felt in their consummation, we will have a chance of understanding the felt worth of values when they come into conflict with one another. Given traditional expectations, it sounds preposterous to consider taking a shower, getting up at night for a drink of water, or two people having sex, as models of what human values are, and how they are worked out. But that is what Pepper argues. Once we really learn the method of following discrete values from source to consummation, we will see that it can illuminate a great many problem situations. The consummation phase - in other words the satisfying feelings that go with completion of an act -- is important in understanding the values in carrying out a purpose at all. Examples need not be simple. The consummatory joy of learning, for example, when learning is not attempted under punitive auspices, helps to resolve the clash between "requirements" and "electives," and it also enables people to define themselves as enjoyers of learning,⁴⁴ which in turn changes their other value choices.

[25] In the background of Pepper's choice of "obvious" models such as taking a shower there seems to be a realization that most inhabitants of American society are somewhat inexperienced in having and noting good experiences. Even "simple" things like consuming a delicious drink of water (it turns out to be suspiciously chlorinated, let us say) are not very enjoyable. But there is enough of such good experience to allow the approach to appeal intelligently, providing its depth can be intuited.

[26] The difficulty may be due to a cultural lag not only in values but in philosophical disputation. So much of it today seems to be a kind of "squaring off," or fortress-construction, or the building of numerous, not very related sandhills of terminological clarification. While there is no use protesting against the history of philosophy, I would respectfully offer a suggestion to get things going, taking a hint from the exercises designed for high school students by James H. Quinta and Lin Alessio.["World Hypotheses as Methods for Teaching the Humanities in Secondary Schools", Paunch 53-54] A "session" on Pepper's value theory today might include role-play sequences where each participant were to discuss a problem in values using Pepper's method, with an opponent who takes the role of not understanding the approach at all. Each would have the task, for example, of both attempting to explain and refusing to understand the instance of the thirsty geologist in pursuit of water, described in The Sources of Value. There might then be clarification, not only of Pepper's position, but of one's own predisposed "set" in arguments about value.

METAPHYSICS AND METAPHOR

[27] Pepper's approach to metaphysics, though still in use and gaining adherents, is greatly at variance with the metaphysical and the would-be anti-metaphysical trends in current philosophy. Pepper began formalizing his theory of what metaphysics is in an article of 1935, at a time when the logical positivists were promising to show that it was nothing at all.⁴⁵ The positivist program has now been abandoned but we are again in a time of denial. Although few now would echo Husserl's claim to a "pre-suppositionless" philosophy, many are impressed with the efforts of Heidegger to evade metaphysics in the pursuit of philosophy. Heidegger's disciple Hans-Georg Gadamer has written a theory of hermeneutics with that goal in mind.⁴⁶ Jacques Derrida, following Nietzsche, is both denying all traditional metaphysics and, it seems, unavowedly creating a new brand.⁴⁷ Michel Foucault has attempted to develop "acategorical thought."⁴⁸

[28] All of these developments are embroiled in complexities, but a few observations are in order. Even if we credit the claims now being made for a new discourse that evades the misconceptions fostered by prose itself, we may still have to estimate the achievement of such a discourse as at least partially a loss. Both Derrida and Lacan have been valued, for example, by feminists for their analysis of argumentative discourse as a phallocentric ordering of reality. Myra Love has pointed out, however, that there is much less help here for feminists than first appeared: "In practical terms, the immediate danger has been that some 'feminist' followers of Derrida have acted upon the identification of logocentrism with phallocentricism. They dismiss all logical discourse as innately 'male,' thus rejecting a potentially useful tool because of the uses it has been put to in patriarchy, without trying to appropriate its emancipatory potential."⁴⁹ Moreover, any supposedly non-metaphysical writing, if subjected to the kind of analysis that Pepper applied to a similar kind of claim once made for descriptions of a simple red tomato,⁵⁰ would soon reveal metaphysical assumptions aplenty. What we have, then, is incoherence at one end and a hidden metaphysic at the other, with a further trouble in the project showing as it lifts off into space: rather little work gets done. David Couzens Hoy has defended and explicated Gadamer, in fact, precisely on the grounds that his project for a non-metaphysical hermenutic is not intended as a general underlying theory of the nature of thought.⁵¹ This is as one would expect, except that it is regularly couched in such language as to make one think the opposite: "Understanding, and with it the hermeneutic circle, becomes a condition for the possibility of human experience and inquiry."⁵² Foucault, after a period of silence, has resumed his publications with little attention to former claims to dissolve rationality into the "episteme." He is certainly not raising skeptical doubts as to the reality of a category like "discipline."⁵³

[29] The Anglo-American project for analysis anchored in linguistic practice now turns up admissions that, again, nothing is accomplished after the initial negative clarifications. In aesthetics for example:

... results of the past few decades of Anglo-American analytical aesthetics have been consistently negative. (Does "traditional" aesthetics rest on a mistake? Yes. Is the artist's intention relevant in judging the success of his work? No. Can we find necessary or sufficient conditions of a work of art? No Is psychology relevant to aesthetics? NO.)⁵⁴

[31] For Pepper neither utter skepticism nor extreme relativism can lead anywhere in philosophy. From 1916 onward, he maintained that values are facts which "are open to descriptive procedures,"⁵⁵ and that there is indeed a rooting of value in fact. To the skepticism of our time, he retorted "I would not give the least credence to an ought that did not come out of an is."⁵⁶ The fact-value separation will turn out to be a blind alley. We waste people's time and minds by directing them along such lines, and we probably miss as well that such projects as Derrida's are split-off segments (dependently negative arguments) of the very systems they claim to evade, much as Pepper found Bishop Berkeley's idealism to be a fragment of the empiricism it was designed to refute.⁵⁷

[32] Pepper's theory of metaphysics is, in the first place, a method for doing the necessary work, and not an attempt to devise a metaphysics. As he put it in the autobiographical preface of 1942, his successive disenchantments with the certainties offered by theology, dogmatic materialism, individualistic democracy (rendered dubious by the upheavals of the first quarter of this century), and his awakening to the values of pragmatism (despite his very best efforts to avoid it), redirected his "old drive for the truth toward the study of evidence and hypothesis -- toward a reliable method rather than a reliable creed."⁵⁸ If Pepper succeeded in founding such a method, his achievement is tremendous. Probably no one in philosophy today would undertake such a task; indeed the title of Gadamer's book, Truth and Method, is understood ironically to mean that there is no truth in method,⁵⁹ that no reliable method is to be found anywhere in metaphysics. What Pepper attempts to do is to deploy four basic metaphysical positions, show how each one is dynamically evolved from a root metaphor, demonstrate the internal tensions within each of these systems as well as their limitations -- but also to defend their value as the best approaches we have to understanding. In order to do this, Pepper had to maintain his neutrality and sympathy for all four positions. He seems to have short-changed some important metaphysical positions; it is clear that Charles Hartshorne, for example, will never agree that Pepper correctly exhibited the ,categories or the roots of Whitehead's philosophy even after Pepper acknowledged some shortcomings of his 1942 description and endeavored to correct them.⁶⁰ [See Hartshorne's comment of Pepper, in Paunch 53-54] In the most serious fullscale probe into the question of Pepper's method, however, Joseph Monast argued in 1975 that the necessary neutrality in delineating the four theories is well sustained in Pepper's argument.⁶¹

[33] Pepper realized, as he wrote in another page of the personal statement with which we began, that "In a way there was nothing new about" the world hypotheses. "They were the same old theories we had read about in every extended history of philosophy."⁶² But exhibiting each of them as hypotheses was an original departure, with vast methodological implications. It offers a procedure for dealing with truth-claims of any scope and, more importantly, of any style. If a writer qualifies his remarks carefully, and avoids extreme language, as in most of the professional writing we know, he is no farther from validity than if he were to claim absolute truth for his conclusions -- but he is also not necessarily any closer, either. Convert All Truth Claims to Hypotheses -- such is the imperative. My observation is that this notion is quite unknown in the field of "English." English has in the past twenty years been swamped in philosophical preoccupations (often handled with an obsessive drive toward certainty and "validation" in the jobmarket); at the same time many retain a pre-philosophical faith in a writer's style as the guarantee of his reliability. The conversion of truth-claim to hypothesis is a way around this bog. It is not incidental that the world hypothesis method can generate many questions for its practitioners to work out on their own, as Quina and Alessio show in their argument for a new mode of teaching in the humanities. The method facilitates new thought, where otherwise there would be lulled acceptance or nonproductive skepticism.

[34] Critical thought does not mean, for Pepper, a "negation" of the "false" one-dimensional reality in which we are immersed. To think critically, a person must be able to handle at least two views of the world. But not just any two; our students and teachers have no shortage of ready alternatives at hand. The point is to find two or more views of the world that have maximum scope and precision in their ability to accommodate all manners of evidence and theory. Pepper is the only philosopher to argue consistently that actually there are only four or five such relatively adequate views; though he never shut the door to the arrival of new world hypotheses, and in fact created the fifth one, called "selectivism," himself, he did not find any others that gave as good results as these five.

[35] That each of these five hypotheses is organized intrinsically around its own root metaphor is well known as Pepper's original theory. But what this means is widely misunderstood. It is obvious that there can be no possibility of appreciating root metaphor if the hard line is maintained, in Charles Hartshorne's communication, namely that "Metaphors are rhetorical devices, and in my view philosophical issues are primarily logical and to be stated in considerable measure literally." But there is more danger in some of the acceptances of Pepper's theory than in this clear rejection. For those working in theory of literature, it is tempting to regard root metaphor as license for regarding all of reality as somehow metaphorical, an outlook motivated by a desire to elevate the imagination to a height above recalcitrant reality of any kind, or even for putting the mind out of touch with the non-discursive world altogether. The latter objective can be obtained by stipulating, as Jacques Derrida does in his highly regarded article on metaphor and metaphysics, that "Metaphor has always been defined as the trope of resemblance... between what are already two signs, the one designating the other."⁶³ Reality thus becomes totally linguistic and the metaphorical "endlessly constructs its own destruction."⁶⁴ David Edge, writing in the same special "metaphor issue" of New Literary History, assigns to metaphor the major function in intellectual freedom, by virtue of "the ability to chose which metaphors we will be seized by."⁶⁵ This is all very well, but Pepper's way of aligning certain kinds of metaphor within the dynamics of world hypotheses leads to recognizing that some of the choices we make will lead to "pure fantasy and absurdity," as he maintains in "Metaphor in Philosophy." No such distinction is possible when metaphor is treated as arbitrary through and through, as it is in Derrida's metaphysics. To do so is to ignore the whole question of the cognitive adequacy of metaphor in philosophy. Derrida for his part simply subsumes all metaphor under the metaphysical "law of sameness,"⁶⁶ a rule to which he himself does not subscribe.

[36] In a recent special issue of Critical Inquiry also devoted to problems of metaphor, Wayne C. Booth actually employs Pepper's concept of the root metaphor, noting correctly that only four or five world hypotheses have survived the criticism of their rivals. But in accounting for this survival, Booth reduces the issue of plausibility to one of rhetorical effectiveness (which for him includes the moral value of the maker of a metaphor),⁶⁷ rather than the adequacy of the evidence with in a chosen framework. Some of Pepper's key formulations in "Metaphor in Philosophy" are that metaphor is "the use of one part of experience to illuminate another -- to help us understand, comprehend, even to intuit, or enter the other..." A metaphor challenges by seeming to "affirm an identity while also half denying it." His wording shows awareness of features of language which do not bear reduction to logical discourse, and also assigns to metaphor a role in discovery that would not be handed over to literally formulated hypotheses. Discovery requires the additional functions that metaphor allows: to "comprehend, even to intuit, or enter the other" part of experience that we do not know, and these processes are not simply the analogical extensions of a concept. But the fact that even in the validation of hypotheses a root metaphor is involved, does not mean that there is no such thing as confirmation. That pure literalness is never attained does not abolish questions of adequacy. The mere extension of a guiding metaphor into more and more areas, relieved of any question of adequacy, is not "entering" these areas; it is just going ahead willfully or blindly subduing them to preconception.

[37] There are formulations in Thomas S. Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that seem to be asking to be read as instances of the willful extension of paradigm over helpless fact. To give but one of these, Kuhn wrote, at the end of his chapter on "Revolution as Changes in World View," that after Dalton's epochal change in the theory of chemistry, chemists "had still to beat nature into line" in order to get it to conform to their new paradigm.⁶⁸ There is no need to point out that a metaphysic of idealism lurks in such a statement. By now other philosophers of science have commented on the idealism in Kuhn's work exhaustively and, at least to their own satisfaction, decisively. Frederick Suppe, editor of a major symposium in which Kuhn confronts these critics, rather happily declares Kuhn the loser.⁶⁹ (Kuhn, with whom I spoke briefly about this, does not agree!) Suppe sums up the debate, as well as the current state of theory of science, by claiming that overwhelmingly, a "correspondence between theories and reality" is what science is now (again) thought to be all about.⁷⁰ Metaphor, root or other, is hardly a topic in this authoritative volume.

[38] Pepper adapts Kuhn's argument into "Metaphor in Philosophy." It might be worth asking if "paradigm" as Kuhn means that term was not partly a result of Pepper's influence in the first place. Kuhn has been kind enough to reply to my queries on this. He recalls first reading World Hypotheses in 1945, while working under James Conant. Kuhn's training originally was in physics; he seems to have had his first full-time position in philosophy at Berkeley, where Pepper was chairman of the department (following on his art department chairmanship). Pepper, Kuhn told me, was largely responsible for bringing him out there. After reading Pepper's discussion of him in "Metaphor in Philosophy" Kuhn was unable to say whether he drew any direct influence from Pepper, though he grants the appropriateness of the question.

[39] But Kuhn also sees in the article a conflation of metaphor and hypothesis on Pepper's part with which he does not agree.⁷¹ To the extent that Pepper did conflate the two, it was for the purpose of describing the dynamics of metaphysical systems. Since questions of cognitive adequacy are essential within his root metaphor theory, he would not make a similar claim for metaphor in general. To Suppe, with his search for correspondence between theory and fact, as well as to Derrida, with his ironic reference to philosophy's "law of similarity," one may counter with Pepper's insistence that there are four or five relatively adequate theories of correspondence, one for each of the world theories. In World Hypotheses, Pepper was intent on exhibiting each of the theories in its purest form; hence he seemed to be saying that only formism (Plato, Aristotle, and the "forms," and all their philosophical descendants) used the correspondence theory of truth.⁷² But his later clarification is that "Every relatively adequate world hypothesis must have a respectable theory of similarity."⁷³ The formistic one is only the most conspicuous.

[40] Given these considerations, it would seem both Kuhn and his opponents are suffering a kind of philosophical deja vu. Kuhn's attempt to both qualify and hold on to his somewhat idealistic descriptions of science, and the other side's reversion to a single correspondence theory (which they now regard as safely repaired from the damages once done to it by instrumentalism and by positivists), will only lead to a replay of previous positions.

[41] The avoidance of such repetitions was one of the purposes for which Pepper's theory of definition was designed. For him, definition is a 3-cornered affair, with continuous feedback between theory, terminology, and whatever it is we may refer to as reality. Theory could not have direct "correspondence" with reality, as Suppe hopes to see it have, but it can have "truth-reference value." Pepper's theory of definition won considerable approval from John Dewey and Arthur Bentley, in Knowing and the Known, where they mercilessly undercut almost every concept in epistemology.⁷⁴ The theory of definition, designed to avoid vicious circularity in metaphysics, also gained acceptance in Theory of Literature, by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren.⁷⁵ And Victorino Tejera, in his book Art and Human Intelligence, adopted Pepper's concept of definition, precisely because he thought it did avoid circularity.⁷⁶

[42] Pepper's procedures on definition are, however, almost inaudible when listened to with the aid of the analytic modes of discourse of today, as Robert J. Yanal shows in his attack.[ "Pepper on Definitions and Aesthetics," and "Pepper on Truth and Beauty: A Comment on Yanal", Paunch, 53-54] The reply to that by Robert L. Armstrong shows where the problem lies from Pepper's side of the controversy. The chasm between approaches here reflects the provincial divisions within professional philosophy, a situation especially unfortunate if it is true, as I maintain, that Pepper's work on definition is one of the major contributions in all of recent thought -- for those at least who believe that there is more to the world than discourse.

[43] Since the several world hypotheses do share something in their theories of truth, it may be asked whether they retain their distinct qualities. Here it might be useful to notice work done well after 1942, the date of World Hypotheses, which corroborates Pepper's arrangement. Brian Caraher has shown that when Frege, a philosopher Pepper did not discuss, implants two different root metaphors into his deliberations, the distinct qualities in each soon start to give some very illuminating trouble. [See Caraher’s "Telescoping Sense: Conflicting Root Metaphors in Frege’s Theory of Meaning," in Paunch 53-54) There is also some empirical evidence that the major world hypotheses are present in the ways that ordinary people view the world, and that the dividing lines between people can be understood accordingly. James Laird, a psychologist at Clark University, has investigated the extent of non-cooperation between holders of the different hypotheses, and is at work on a developmental model in which the learning order of the original set of four hypotheses is correlated with growth.⁷⁷ Maxine Harris, working under Laird's direction, has developed a World Hypotheses Scale. Dr. Harris, after completing her dissertation, entitled "The World Hypotheses Scale: A Study of World Organizing Systems" (1975), has gone on to further experimentation. She has argued that the four original hypotheses of Pepper's set "are independent entities" in personality measurement, givinq information not to be duplicated by other known instruments."⁷⁸ As one demonstration of practical validity, Harris and co-workers have offered a study in the treatment of alcoholism(!) based on the prediction that formists will do fairly well in a formistically oriented program like Alcoholics Anonymous, with its insistence on matching the identity of the participant with a type or form ("I am an alcoholic"), while those who are more contextualist would not thrive in such an atmosphere but would do better in other kinds of therapy. These predictions appear to have been born out.⁷⁹

[44] Other recent applications of Pepper's categories demonstrate both their precision and their huge range. David Richardson has shown how formism may apply to the ethics of G. E. Moore, a point that Pepper himself finally made in a very late article, but made rather crudely, contentiously charging Moore with the very fallacy that Moore had charged everyone else with making. Richardson returns to the original chapter on formism in World Hypotheses, and combines this with insights gained from work by R. S. Hartman, to bring out Moore's formism after all. [See Richardson’s "Stephen Pepper’s Formist Light on G.E. Moore" in Paunch 53-54]The method works here beyond the personal quirks of its originator, a good sign. Michael Shott translated and analyzed a very mixed collection of music reviews written by Hugo Wolf. Shott found that Wolf's critical comments and evaluation also fit rather well into the category of formism.⁸¹ Joan Walls took Pepper's root metaphor of mechanism and applied it in 1975 to one of the areas of British empiricism to which it might be predicted to have relevance, namely to the psychology of David Hartley.

[45] Brent Kilbourn, in a University of Toronto doctoral dissertation of 1974, investigated one of the key problems in the philosophy of science, the implantation of a world view through the assumptions of a standard textbook (in this case one on biology). Though Kilbourn's results were not as clear-cut as those obtained by Caraher, Richardson, Laird, Harris, Shott, or Walls, he is undoubtedly right in urging that more studies of this kind be undertaken for what they will eventually tell us about science as well as educational practices.⁸³

[46] One further example comes from Pepper himself. In a contribution to a symposium held on the systematic philosophy of James K. Feibleman, [The editors than Professor Feibleman for supplying a copy of the proceedings and for his comments on Pepper.] Pepper undertook to classify and then to evaluate Feibleman's aesthetics under the rubric of formism.⁸⁴ As Pepper had pointed out much earlier, a formist is usually not interested in what any one individual (whether artist or perceiver) may have felt in the experience of a work of art; the emphasis instead is on the similarity of the experience to a universal norm of beauty. This shifts the location of value in formistic aesthetics toward an impersonal cognition of the norm. It leaves feelings behind, or at least subordinated.

[47] In the symposium at which Pepper delivered this critique, Feibleman pretty well agreed despite his differences in terminology and approach: aesthetic analysis should not become involved in emotion, because that would obstruct the analysis, notwithstanding the undeniable presence of emotion in aesthetic experience. Moreover "affective response" is ultimately not an individual matter, it is "a world-element and not itself subjective.⁸⁵ This does seem to be the language of formism, leading all the way back to Plato.

[48] The relatively low value that formism places upon individual emotions would suggest that it would have been difficult for Pepper to maintain his even-handedness in describing this, among the other theories. At one point, I sent Pepper some class notes I had prepared for use in teaching The Basis of Criticism in the Arts, in which I not only gave vent to my own dislike of formism but suggested that his descriptions of the position seemed somewhat artificial. He replied: "Your intuition that I may be trying to 'prop up' formism has some basis. I do think it is the weakest of the relatively adequate world theories. The multitude of varieties of it, as you say -- like the multitude of animistic myths -- is a bad symptom. But its root-metaphor of similarity-qualitative identity in numerical multiplicity--is intuitively so disarming I can't dismiss it. Also it justifies the concept of 'normality,' as no other view does, etc. etc. However, I don't object to your somewhat disparaging comments about it." ⁸⁶ Actually, Pepper himself was highly attracted to the notion of 'normality,' a problem I will take up shortly. What I note in his statement on formism in this letter is his refusal to give it up, realizing that it cannot be spirited away even if he or I or anyone else doesn't like it. It cannot be elided into another of the world views without losing one of the major instruments of thought.

[49] Maintaining the balance within the four separate views is not easy. Nonetheless Pepper maintained that balance, if imperfectly, to the end. One of his very last letters, addressed to David B. Richardson, shows his continued realization that though the major root metaphor systems often have similarities, their differences remain real.[Our thanks to Professor Richardson for the text of this letter.—the editors] Richardson had sent him a manuscript entitled Organicism, Holism, and Harmony, in which he examined organistic and contextualist features in Asian philosophy. In reply, Pepper wrote (in part):

Your exposition of the major organistic and contextualistic traits of Indian and Chinese philosophy is very convincing and informative. And all your references to my treatment of these two movements with their close similarities in many respects about the treatment of wholes, and wide difference in the end, or between an open 'horizontal' contextual world and finally closed vertical, hierarchical organistic world -- is just my point too, but yet the organistic world is still dynamic in its progressive phase, and the contextualistic does aim for gestalts and wholes in its experimental dealings with itself. But the latter insists on the final actuality of the changing events -- and no final terminus to it.⁸⁷

[51] Pepper, in an exchange published in 1957 had maintained stoutly that the criterion of relevancy in aesthetics, the relevancy of any connection felt to be genuine in a work of art, is not arbitrary.⁹⁰ I wondered if he might have been willing to change his mind about this. Characteristically, however, he warmly approved of my arguments but concluded only that "there is a lot of qualified treatment of that concept" (i.e., organicism) "to be done."⁹¹ Far from discounting organicism or reducing it to an all-encompassing monism lacking in finesse, as Hartshorne suggests, Pepper, a few weeks after his remarks to me, was reiterating to David B. Richardson (in another part of the letter quoted above), that mysticism "is quite distinct from organicism though often tacked on to the top of it -- as with F. H. Bradley, and Hocking -- but not with Bosanquet or Royce or (I'd say) Hegel. The undifferentiated unity of the mystic Nirvana as final ecstasy of unity with the universe, is so contrary to the ultimate coherent discriminations of all things in the clarity of the organistic absolute in which nothing turns out to be unreal except the absences of coherences in finite experience."⁹²

CLARIFYING CONTEXTUALISM FOR HUMAN USES

[52] If Pepper favored any of the world hypotheses, many would say that it was contextualism. Certainly he contributed greatly to its development. Through his descriptions of its root metaphor, its categories, the difficulties and the triumphs in its theory of truth, he has helped the pragmatist movement to survive through a dark period. I inquired of Pepper whether it was he who had actually invented the term "Contextualism," taking a hint given by William Savery in The Philosophy of John Dewey, edited by P. A. Schilpp (1939): "Professor Pepper has, I believe, characterized Dewey's entire philosophy as contextualism."⁹³ Dewey, replying to his various critics in that volume, did fall back upon the term Contextualism, and wished that they had taken it more seriously.⁹⁴ I guessed that Pepper had thought of the term after Dewey lectured in California on "Context and Thought," and had the lecture published in 1931 in the University of California Publications in Philosophy.⁹⁵ Pepper agreed that he probably had given this term to the pragmatists, but thought that the date was sometime in the early 20's, in an article in that same California series.⁹⁶ We never quite pinned this down. The issue of course is not the label, but Pepper's use of it as a way of recognizing the metaphysical dimensions of pragmatism. "I needed a term for the metaphysics of pragmatism, especially as many pragmatists did not think it had any metaphysical presuppositions -- as so often happens with the doctrinal exponents of a school (e.g., Berkeley and Hume!). Dewey read the article, and picked up the term, and that made it official from then on."⁹⁷

[53] Pepper begins his exposition of contextualism by stressing its radical quality: " ... in this theory nothing shall be construed as denying that anything may happen in the world. Thus change and novelty accepted in the most radical sense will be regarded as the fundamental presuppositions of this theory."⁹⁸ This "most radical sense" when applied to the aesthetic experiences of literature, leads to radical personal change, with radical social revaluations in the offing. Such is the argument made by John Herold. In opposition, however, is the argument by John M. Hill, which is that because contextualism is so open, so lacking in boundary lines, it is too indefinite to serve as a guide when any real disagreement comes up in reading a literary work.[John Herold, "Pepper’s Analysis of the Work of Art: Radical Implications."; John M. Hill, "Pepper’s Contextualism and the Reader’s Values." Both in Paunch 53-54 with a further reply by Herold, "Feeling Tess’s Pain: response to John Hill."] The contextualist's answer to this kind of charge might be, as Pepper put it in World Hypotheses, "Catch me if you can," that is, the test is the specific situation. In one vivid scene of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hill and Herold have just the kind of situation that is difficult and important enough to challenge the claims of contextualist analysis; it is also a situation whose boundaries are definite enough to permit clarification of the disagreement.

[54] A part of Hill's argument that I find personally fascinating is his contention that the use of contextualism by Professor Wayne Burns, in the English Department at the University of Washington, must have taken its shape from other commitments of Burns. ⁹⁹ I myself learned of Pepper through study with Burns. I recall one seminar in the early 60's where Burns agreed -- at least for that occasion -- with a student who argued that behind Burns' contextualism there must be at least one non-contextualistic assumption, namely the mechanistic axiom that pleasure is good and pain bad. The problem may not be in some failure on Burns' part to clarify contextualism, however, but in a lack of clarity somewhere in contextualism itself, hinging on this very issue of pleasure, pain and the human body.

[55] Pepper himself set out to clarify contextualism first in aesthetics, with the publication of his Aesthetic Quality: A ContextualisticTheory of Beauty (1938), and with his contribution one year later to The Philosophy of John Dewey, "Some Questions On Dewey's Aesthetics." ¹⁰⁰ Pepper's questions for Dewey all came down to this: why include many terms or procedures of what has been central to organistic aesthetics side by side with those of contextualism? Pepper had no doubt that in Art As Experience (1934) Dewey had given a genuinely contextualist aesthetic, one that was new in the entire history of philosophy, but he thought it had been diluted and confused. Dewey's reply is that Pepper should not have been so foolish as to take, the organicist features of his writing in Art As Experience seriously; had Pepper merely followed the guidelines that Dewey had stipulated early on, there would have been no trouble. ¹⁰¹ For some years, I was impressed with Dewey's answer, and was tempted to accept his demolition, or so it seemed, of Pepper's argument. When I changed my mind, it was because I began to suspect that Dewey's unusually caustic tone was not a mark of strength, but a sign that he had been threatened. His advice to Pepper on how to read Art as Experience amounted to asking that we re-write that book as we read it.

[56] Pepper's contention that the pre-contextualist assertions in Art As Experience are potentially serious obstructions has been confirmed recently by James S. Ackerman, professor of fine arts at Harvard. Ackerman does not cite Pepper, but independently finds that Dewey "did not succeed in-explaining how the criteria of organization and of integration that are focal in his evaluation of works of art differ from idealist universals ... In contrast to Dewey, I believe that ultimately a choice has to be made among the differential values revealed by his open-minded critical approach."¹⁰² This is exactly what Pepper was saying in 1939. As for the defense that Dewey's language is only confusing because we fail to observe the controls and conditions he puts upon his constructions, I would now have to agree with Georges Dicker, in his monograph, Dewey's Theory of Knowing. Dicker's position is that the only way to save Dewey's great contributions to theory of knowledge is to learn to read "what Dewey should have said," not what he actually did say. His many statements that the knower himself constructs the object that he comes to know, must be seen in their context to permit the knowledge of objects that Dewey literally seems to deny. Immense cultural pressures at work on Dewey caused him almost deliberately to make statements which, while they succeeded in avoiding the habitual analytic aspersions against the dignity of lived experience, came at great cost in clarity.¹⁰³ Contextualism will remain one of the great world hypotheses, but the task of clarification is serious. Often it actually is necessary to rewrite Dewey as we go along and Dewey is saying such important things that this will be worth the effort. We will also need the more systematic organization of the contextualistic categories by Pepper, and many have now turned to these.

[57] Pepper's contextualism, however, is not fully represented in World Hypotheses. Three years later, in The Basis of Criticism in the Arts, he made a serious departure in delineating the root metaphor, from that of "the historic event," by which is meant the human act in its context,¹⁰⁴ to the situation and the values that are created within it. Pepper had warned, in fact, that his outline of the contextualistic categories in the earlier book was a choice for that particular presentation:

"There are many ways of framing a set of working categories for contextualism. I do not claim any other virtue for this set except its balance and clarity for the purpose of our present and rapid exposition." As he goes on to say, it is a feature of contextualism itself to be able to accommodate "the different emphases provided by different arrangements of concepts governing events," without generating "different world theories."¹⁰⁵ By 1945, when he came out with The Basis of Criticism, he had the assistance of Otis Lee's major article, "Value and the Situation."¹⁰⁶ Pepper begins his new discussion of contextualism by quoting from it at length.¹⁰⁷ One of the differences in emphasis is that the series of perceptions making up an aesthetic event may go on for some time, with intervals of "minutes, days, or years." ¹⁰⁸ This would be true within any of the major aesthetics, but it is a feature that fits most naturally with contextualism. Much later, and equipped with his concept of the purposive act, Pepper responded to my question, which was the more crucial, event or situation:

Your question about the contextualistic concepts of "events" and "situation" is a penetrating one. Get those settled and almost everything else follows ... More work needs to be done on that concept ["situation"]. You stimulate me to write a paper on it. One thing is sure, a situation is not to be equated with an actual event. It spreads over possibly many events, and the events it includes need not be contiguous. [Pepper's underline.] Just as-you can put down and later pick up a novel to read -- so situations may skip over long periods and emerge for completion. As an approach, analyze the situations described in any good realistic novel -- Flaubert or Tolstoy or Dickens or Thackeray. Some are short, some are long. Sometimes it is somewhat arbitrary whether you call it one situation or two, one growing out of the other. As a model situation take any simple purposive act free from contextual interference by other purposes -- there is a simple situation. Now drop in more and more purposes that are simultaneously seeking goals and demand mutual adjustment. The spread in time and space of these demands for satisfaction give the area of the situation. The situation is over when these demands cease, whether by fulfillment, frustration or compromise. The situation consists in these purposive strands so far as they tangle and stick together.¹⁰⁹

Incidentally two or more abstract situations could overlap in the same time span -- e.g., a game of chess while drinking a high ball while traveling in a plane to meet a lecture engagement, and perhaps beginning to wonder when a toilet will be free. If these do not interfere with one another, they are different simultaneous situations -- though the moment you should raise the possible problem for yourself that they might need to be scheduled they would suddenly all fall into a single situation of scheduling. -- There are some fascinating questions in this area!¹¹⁰

[58] The discussion of "situation" may suggest another obvious question: what of the Continental uses of this term? Pepper, in another letter, saw both likeness and divergence: "Actually Sartre's conception of 'situation' is about the same as Dewey’s minus all the behavioristic tie-ups. Indeed a lot of phenomenology is strongly contextualistic -- but without adequate consideration of the physical and biological or even the social world. I doubt if Sartre was influenced at all by Dewey or vice versa. But both with an empirical insight caught the importance for values of their relations to "situations."¹¹¹ All of Pepper's remarks on the meaning of "situation" show his practice of having "tie-backs" to the quality of experience as it is actually lived, not simply in spite of the abstract level of discussion, but because that is exactly where such tie-backs are needed the most. In this, he is close to Dewey, although more consistent, is similarly close to Dewey in his commitment finally to empirical evidence. The evidence is "unrefined," as he would have called it, in these letters, but evidence even in metaphysics can become highly refined and corroborated. It is possible with the empirical commitment not only to argue about, but to investigate an "event" or "situation." Richard H. Laing's doctoral dissertation (1974) actually does that, employing video tapes to examine the quality of the "strands" within a given event, in the field of art education. ^1l2 Empirical method can still be essential in philosophy, when it is carried through as Laing has done, and when, as in contextualism, it is a method congenial to the underlying philosophical premises that are at work.

[59] In fact, Pepper's work on contextualism is having its most serious impact right now, in many new studies undertaken in varied disciplines. Barry K. Grant has applied it to problems of film criticism, particularly in the special category of "genre" film, showing how contextualism can lead to evaluations within the field of popular culture. [see Barry K. Grant, "Prolegomena to a Contextualistic Genre Criticism" in Paunch 53-54] Caraher's article on root metaphor in Frege, already mentioned, connects contextualism with current Speech Act Theory. A number of American psychologists are exploring contextualism as a way out of the confines of the mechanistic root metaphor, in which the human body is taken to be a kind of machine, existing within a social world that is ultimately also a machine. There is considerable feeling that American psychology, with its mechanistic view of the human being, has been reinforcing our culture's fatal worship of technology. James C. Mancuso has suggested that the pervasive relation between obedience and authority, documented in the experiments of Stanley Milgram, is only to be expected when "the majority of our population believe they should view themselves from a mechanist Perspective."¹¹³ Mancuso, who sees a veritable "contextualistic revolution" going on in the present field of psychology, has with his associates contributed contextualistic insights to motivation, ethical development, and other psychological topics. ¹¹⁴ He and his mentor, Theodore Sarbin, will be publishing their contextualistic book on schizophrenia shortly.¹¹⁵ The damages done in the whole field of medicine by the mechanistic world view, and its bankruptcy, are described in the forthcoming article, "Philosophical Roots of the Current Medical Crisis," co-authored by Joan M. Boyle and James E. Morriss.¹¹⁶ David F. Hultsch has argued for the primacy of a contextualistic model in the field of gerontology, where mechanism can only supply a "downhill" model of aging. ¹¹⁷ Godfried T. Toussaint of the School of Computer Science at McGill University in Montreal falls back on Pepper for an explanation of the contextualist assumptions behind his highly refined study, "The Use of Context in Pattern Recognition."¹¹⁸ And Joseph Z. Nitecki has developed a fine contextualistic model for library science.¹¹⁹

[60] One of the most accessible accounts of the turn toward contextualism is the article by James J. Jenkins, "Remember That Old Theory of Memory? Well, Forget it!"¹²⁰ Jenkins, a distinguished researcher, had been leading most of his department at the University of Minnesota in a series of experiments on memory, and getting good confirmations of the hypotheses they were using. As he explains in the article -- it is his presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1973 -- the realization hit that all this research was mechanist and probably quite false in its conception of mental processes. "...I became convinced that I was caught by a metatheoretical trap, a trap that I had built for myself without having realized it." Pepper's theories of world hypotheses of contextualism in particular helped Jenkins break out of this trap. The account given by Jenkins is a prime illustration of Pepper's contention that we do not even realize we are dealing with a hypothesis of what the world is like until we are brought up against an alternate world hypothesis.

TOWARD A NEW WORLD HYPOTHESIS

[61] Yet in some respects the encounter of mechanism with contextualism is incomplete. Contextualism as the philosophy of ever-changing events, none of them ever to be replicated exactly, provides a wonderful freeing-up process for anyone caught in dogmatic mechanism, as Pepper has acknowledged he-himself until the early 20s. To stimulus-response predictability it is possible to counter with contextualism's almost unlimited openness. But even with the roots of the contextualist metaphor located in the situation as a whole, there is still a vagueness. I think I can locate its origins by considering a passage at the beginning of the chapter on contextualism in The Basis of Criticism in the Arts: "The most striking feature of contextualism is the relative insignificance of the boundaries of the human body. The body becomes simply a constant detail in a man's changing environment somewhat like the clothes he wears and the profession he follows.¹²¹ The "boundaries" of the body might not be as important as we tend to think, if it is true that emotions and thoughts depend not only on inner processes but on an energy field more extensive than the skin's surface. Even that would not eliminate the boundary altogether, though it would become a permeable one that might be expanded at some times and withdrawn at others. And when the body is reduced to the point of being equated with changing clothes, and is no more important than the choice of profession, I think there is trouble. By 1959 Pepper was signaling a break with contextualism over this very issue, in an article on the mind-body problem:

... the physiological organism seems to be too stable and predictable a physical structure to be reasonably reduced to a schema of operational procedures. Yet this is what a thoroughgoing pragmatic operationalism would apparently have to do with the physical body described in books of anatomy and physiology.

Now, in this paper I propose to accept the physicalist account of the physiological body as a functioning configuration of cells occupying a limited volume of the space-time field.¹²²

[63] There is some question, though, whether Concept and Quality really is a new world hypothesis. Pepper himself admitted that it might turn out to be another, though improved, version of contextualism. ¹²⁶ If that is true, it is not for his lack of trying. In 1969, when Pepper gave his "Autobiography of an Aesthetics" to the American Society for Aesthetics, I wrote I was surprised to see how little there was in it of contextualism. He wrote back: "I'm afraid your image of me as a contextualist may have suffered, but perhaps this is to the good."¹²⁷ In another letter, he acknowledges that "most of my constructive philosophical writing was along contextualist lines" from the late 20s, through the 30s, and "long after," but: "I was never a doctrinal i.e., dogmatic contextualist."¹²⁸ Irwin Edman’s review of Aesthetic Quality: A Contextualistic Theory of Beauty had been most favorable, but, also, "he thought I was a firm believer." Edman, Pepper said, was privately much disappointed in World Hypotheses, but by then Pepper's reputation as a contextualist had been launched. "Even in the blurb of World Hypotheses, (which had not been given me to look over ahead of time) I was advertised as a special exponent of that view."¹²⁹ The book jacket does say that Pepper "is well known as the chief proponent of Contextualism..." This was not the most propitious background for the reception of a new world hypothesis with admittedly contextualistic overtones.

[64] In the long letter quoted above, where Pepper deals with the problem of which is closer to the root in contextualism, event or situation, he employs the concept of the purposive act as if there were no problem in fitting it into contextualist analysis. But all his diagrams of such acts have a formal step by step quality which looks like anything but the representation of events that will be defined differently in each situation. The difference is most noticeable, perhaps, when the earlier work on contextualism is re-read. In World Hypotheses, Pepper had begun with "radical change" as a basic category of the root metaphor for contextualism:

Change in this radical sense is denied by all other world theories. If such radical change is not a feature of the world, if there are unchangeable structures in nature like the forms of formism or the space-time structures of mechanism, then contextualism is false. Contextualism is constantly threatened with evidences for permanent structures in nature.¹³⁰

[65] I do not think he went on to find any "unchangeable structures" such as the forms of underlying reality in formism. That would have been a danger, and Pepper was not always immune to it. The endorsement of censorship that I discussed earlier may come out of his formist inclinations. Near the end of the chapter on Emotion in his Principles of Art Appreciation, he raises the possibility that there may be a universal norm for emotional health, one that is "determined not by conventions of social decorum but by medical and psychological experience." Such a norm would be "scientifically verified."¹³¹ Pepper understood this to mean not a rigid midpoint to which all emotions must conform, but a range, a very wide one, within which the term "normal" would have meaning. I am not objecting to this, because, abused as the concept of the "normal" undoubtedly is (as I myself have pointed out ^l32 ), it will turn out to be a necessary one. What does seem frightening is what follows in Pepper's statement:

The probability that such a norm of good health for the emotions is demonstrable seems to me great. I suggest that psychiatric practice is working on the basis of such a norm now.¹³³

[68] Today what we are lacking is not philosophical support for the concept of human differences, but a way to conceive of life that will allow people to develop a sense of what their shared values might be. Concept and Quality begins to do that. By retaining Pepper's sense that there is a shared need for considerable leeway between social demand and human preferences, it does this in an especially valuable way.

[69] The book pivots, as Pepper acknowledged,¹³⁵ on the mind-body theory known as the "neural-identity theory." I will not try to discuss that embattled theory here, but it is important to notice the direction in which Pepper took it. Actually, neural-identity is most closely associated with Herbert Feigl, with whom Pepper had argued over all of the major issues in Concept and Quality.¹³⁶ It is in comparison with Feigl that Pepper's handling of the theory begins to come out. In Dimensions of Mind, (1960) Feigl wonders if he should not accept the term "pan-qualityism" for his theory, as Pepper had suggested to him. Feigl decides not to, even though the name is accurate: he will continue being called a "materialist."¹³⁷ But quality, Pepper saw as the link between the special mind-body theory and a new world hypothesis in which "there is nothing actual in the world but felt qualities." ¹³⁸ He is probably the only person to use that combination.

[70] Now a world hypothesis must have maximum scope. Pepper is prepared to argue that on this theory, felt qualities extend all the way out through the cosmos, and all the way down below the level of organic existence and into the inorganic.¹³⁹ Pepper in fact predicts (I think correctly) that the boundarv line between organic and inorganic is fading fast in science, and that it probably will dissolve.¹⁴⁰ To those who might react to the new theory with the charge that all this is an "anthropomorphic" fallacy, Pepper replies that on the contrary, to reject it may be to commit an "anthropophobic" fallacy. The human-centeredness allows Pepper to avoid the displacement upward of all value into some all-embracing cosmic purpose, as so often is the case with organicist theories which are premised, as is selectivism, on a concept of reality that is purposeful.¹⁴¹ There is nothing here of Whitehead's notion , in Process and Reality, that the universe is engaged in some sort of "creative advance," and no attraction toward Whitehead's hope, expressed at the end of his book, Religion in the Making, that the human body will nicely disappear in the course of this so-called human advance. In selectivism, the concepts and qualities are all developed from a root metaphor of the specifically human act.

[71] Our knowledge of neural events helps to dissolve the paradoxes of the old mind-body puzzles, and it fits into this world hypothesis with major consequences for value theory. "We have both qualitative and conceptual categorial descriptions ... we are categorically assured that the qualitative categories give us the actual feel of the events, whereas the conceptual categories, give us only neural symbols referring to felt qualities."¹⁴²

[72] Feigl drew limited consequences from all this; in his "personal statement" in the same book in which Pepper tells of the complexities of value experience that he first became aware of at the age of 8, Feigl repudiates the possibility of value theory, and produces another plea for "A life that is lived in accordance with the ideals of justice, kindness, brotherhood, freedom, love and self-perfection..."¹⁴³ It never seems to occur to the makers of such pleas that the human problem is precisely the attempt to force life into these supposedly indubitable goods. I would regard each of them as an abstraction based on the distortion of human desires. If we threw away the terms and got back to their sources we would be much better off

[73] This of course takes us back to Pepper's most persistent interest, value theory. Where Feigl drew no metaphysical conclusions from his work on the mind-body problem, Pepper did the same work and saw connections between neural-identity, purposive acts, and indeed all of reality. For example, Pepper took up the empirical evidence that was being developed in brain physiology by Wilder Penfeld, and showed how it could be used in support of the neural-identity theory, even though the empirical description was far removed from the immediate felt quality of the person experiencing the event.¹⁴⁴ Pepper thus was arguing for a world theory in which the only real things were those that are felt , but in which abstractions virtually drained of immediacy could be used to contribute to the knowledge of that same world, without contradiction. The way was open for eventually understanding values and choices along a route that is neither dogmatic nor controlled by those who discount or discredit the primary value of feelings, emotions, and the human body. Such understanding would make use of evidence gained through observation and processed with minimum emotion, but this could be done without creating a category of the mental that bids to compete with that of the whole human animal. The balance envisioned here is hard to grasp because it is not symmetrical: the neural symbols and the most attenuated abstractions refer back to the felt qualities in which they are finally grounded (if not, their value is nil) -- but the felt qualities do not depend on these symbols, nor do they necessarily refer to them. Moreover, the sensing of felt qualities is now conceived in far too complicated a manner to be reduced to any machine model that mechanism would suggest; mind and body are too intertwined for that. The "aptness of the body" is now characterized in a whole set of body energy categories, which carry Pepper beyond the dynamics of mechanism's pleasure-pain spectrum.¹⁴⁵

[74] For the first time, as he wrote to Joan Boyle, Pepper is accepting the indubitability to the agent at the moment of experience of a felt quality," even though the person’s verbal report of such a quality inescapably remains subject to the shapings and misshapings of whatever world hypothesis may be involved.¹⁴⁶ [ We are grateful to Dr. Boyle for supplying the text of this letter.--The editors.] Concept and Quality stresses the immediacy and pervasiveness of felt qualities all through human experience.¹⁴⁷ In the last analysis, these qualities are not determined by culture. "For on these categories the criteria for truth and falsity are the same no matter what the culture."¹⁴⁸

[75] I imagine that Pepper would be impressed with the evidence recently gathered, experimentally and cross-culturally, by Manfred Clynes, which indicates (though by no means definitively) that the basic emotions are conceived in quite similar patterns, indeed given quite similar delineations, despite the noticeable cultural manifestations, by people everywhere.¹⁴⁹ If that is so, there is nothing to be gained by pretending that human beings differ radically from culture to culture, at this basic level. It will only stymie people in the effort to determine human needs that are not replicas of whatever experiences happen to be "normal" in the various cultures. ¹⁵⁰

[76] Pepper's last theory of the nature of the work of art is especially interesting here. His provocation is most useful on the problems of interpretation. In "The Work of Art Described from a Double Dispositional Base,"¹⁵¹ an article that restates and improves a portion of the final chapter in Concept and Quality, Pepper is treating the interaction of the work of art with the perceiver as if it were possible to reach a valid and sharable interpretation, based not on cultural norms (though these would enter in) but on what he called "natural norms": these are based on the "self-regulative" or feedback system feature of human goal attainment. If you ignore or overpower with preconception major features of an art object, the art object will have ways of letting you know, either in its further interaction with you or with other perceivers. To be sure the art object has only a "passive disposition"; it has to be activated by the perceiver in order for the experience to happen, but when that occurs -- granting some necessary knowledge of the cultural norms to which the work may refer -- it is still the case that these norms do not dictate, finally, what aesthetic values are;¹⁵² nor, if a consensus were to be developed concerning the meaning or value of a given work of art, would that depend on the culture's values. It would be based on the "natural norms" of the perceivers, and these are not laid down by any culture or linguistic convention. [For a more detailed discussion and a further development of Pepper's theory of the work of art, see John Herold's article in Paunch 53-54, "Pepper's Analysis of the Work of Art: Radical Implications."]

[77] Pepper was proud of the last chapter of Concept and Quality, "Aesthetic Quality."¹⁵³ The previous 15 chapters had conceptualized the primary role of felt qualities in many traditional problems of philosophy. The final chapter is partly for redress, moving to aesthetics because that is where we find "qualitative values par excellence."¹⁵⁴ But the strategy somehow is wrong. Shouldn't the qualitative core have come first, not last? By Pepper's own standards, a new root metaphor will require immense rethinking of each major area of theory. The theory of interpretation just mentioned is one such reworking, but there is little else in the long chapter on aesthetics that is at this level. Instead Pepper seems to integrate rather too easily into selectivism laudable qualities of all four of the previous world hypotheses. I am convinced that the chapter as a whole is not persuasive. It only makes selectivism sound eclectic. The fact that Pepper could even give the chapter the same title that his explicitly contextualistic theory of beauty had had, almost 30 years earlier, is indicative.

[78] The argument of the previous 15 chapters is well conceived. Only occasionally however, do I have the feeling that the new root metaphor has been given fitting expression. One such place perhaps, is the chapter on "Similarity in Actual Process."¹⁵⁵ Here Pepper undertakes to describe the way a deer ,might search out, from a number of possibly edible plants, some lily pads to eat.¹⁵⁶ I vividly recall reading this during one of Buffalo's winters. This section, coming just after one entitled "Natural Similarity," is more than well argued; it has a felt quality (for me, at least) that is remarkable.

[79] Concept and Quality is still very new. When it appeared, people did not quite know how to handle it. Usually they did not. There were only 3 reviews, I believe, in all the journals: a rather derisive one in the Journal of Aesthetics, a praising review that neglected to admit there were serious problems involved, and a favorable but somewhat puzzled review by a philosopher bothered by the "obvious" discussion of getting a drink of water. No dialogue has followed. But Pepper could not have been surprised to discover that his new world hypothesis still requires a great deal of work. Such creations are not completed by one person, nor is their value limited to that of a personal accomplishment. Whoever takes up the task, however, would do well to listen to Pepper's comment, at the end of his chapter on "Dispositions":

. . . a serious philosopher on a serious problem will want for his results all that he can get from the deliverances of his common sense and language and general culture, and also from direct attention to the processes of nature, and the researches of the special sciences wherever relevant, and the practices of the arts. ¹⁵⁷

[NOTE: I am much indebted to Joan M. Boyle, Elmer H. Duncan, John Herold, Joseph H. Monast, and Joy Walsh for reading and commenting on this introduction. Special thanks are due to Paul Caputo, of the Health Sciences Library of the State University of New York at Buffalo, for showing me the value of the computer search, and to Patricia Tegler of the Lockwood Library, also at S.U.N.Y-Buffalo for her computer search bibliography on Pepper. I wish to thank Annette Masling, librarian at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, for help in locating material on the artist David Park, discussed on pages 13-14, above. ]
 
 

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References

1. Stephen C. Pepper, "Ideals In Retrospect." In Mid-Twentieth Century Philosophy: Personal Statements, edited by Peter A. Bertocci. New York, 1974, pp. 168-69. Quoted by permission of the publisher, Humanities Press. 2. Pepper, "Ideals in Retrospect," pp. 169-70. 3. Pepper, The Sources of Value, Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1958, pp. 499--60-0. 4. Pepper, Aesthetic Quality: A Contextualistic Theory of Beauty. New York, 1938, p. 99. 5. Pepper, Principles of Art Appreciation. New York and Burlingame, 1949, pp. 117-44. Pages 123-26 are on moods. 6. Pepper, "Autobiography of An Aesthetics." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 28 (Spring, 1970), p. 278. 7. The Sources of Value, P. 584. 8. Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ, 1974. See also the review article of Tom Morris, Telos, #34 (Winter, 1877-78), pp. 242-47. 9. Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1942, p. viii. 10. Ibid. p. 209. 11. Pepper in a letter to Arthur Efron, Nov. 10, 1969. Further quotations in this Introduction from Pepper's letters are to Efron unless otherwise noted. 12. World Hypotheses, p. 228. return

13. Pepper, Concept and Quality: A World Hypotheses. LaSalle, Ill., 1967, p. 116. 14. Principles of Art Appreciation, pp. 171-96 15. "Autobiography of An Aesthetics," p. 278. 16. Principles of Art Appreciation., p. 138 17. The Sources of Value, p. 435. 18. Ibid., pp. 462-64. 19. Thomas Hanna, Bodies in Revolt: A Primer in Somatic Thinking. New York, 1970. 20. Pepper, "On a Descriptive Theory of Value: A Reply to Professor Margolis." Zygon, 4 (Sept., 1969), p. 263. 21. World Hypotheses, pp. 24-36. 22. Ibid., pp. 237ff. 23. See Peyton E. Richter, Introduction to Perspectives in Aesthetics, Plato to Camus. New York, 1967, pp. 17-18. Cf. The recent statement by Walter Kaufmann: "Most philosophy has no sense for art and is much the worse for that. What major philosopher since Plato could one possibly call 'an artistic Socrates,' except Nietzsche, who coined this beautiful image? And even Plato and Nietzsche had little feeling for the visual arts." Life at the Limits. New York, 1978, p. 65. 24. Pepper, letter of Jan. 1, 1968. 25. The Pacific World, 2 (July, 1926) pp. 84-85 26 Charles Hovey Pepper, Japanese Prints. Boston, "c. 1905. Repr. Torrance, California, 1971. 27. Letter from Erle Loran, Nov. 21, 1978. 28. American Scholar, 7 (Autumn, 1938), pp. 403-08. 29. American Scholar, 9 (Spring, 1940), pp. 192-200. 30. Erle Loran, letter, Nov. 21, 1978. return

31. Letter from Glenn A. Wessels, Nov. 27, 1978. 32. Erle Loran, letter, Dec. 15, 1978. 33. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 11 (March, 1953), pp. 255-61. See also Kenneth C. Lindsay, "Mr. Pepper's Defense of Non-Objective Art," in vol. 12, pp. 243-47. 34. "Autobiography of An Aesthetics," p. 286. 35. Concept and Quality, p. 561 36. Pepper, letters of Nov. 10, 1969; Dec. 6, 1969; and Jan. 12, 1970. 37. Pepper, letter of Feb. 14, 1970 38. The Sources of Value, p. 30. 39. Thomas Robischon, article on Perry, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards. New York, 1969, Vol. 6, p. 94. 40. The Sources of Value, p. 431. 41. Ibid., p. 437. return

42. Abraham Edel, "Science and Value: Some Reflections on Pepper's The Sources of Value." Review of Metaphysics, 14 (Sept., 1960), pp. 134-58. 43. Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty,: in his Four Essays on Liberty." London-Oxford-New York, 1969, pp. 11772. 44. See for a recent statement of this argument, with new evidence for it, Sheila Ostrander, Nancy Ostrander, and Lynn Schroeder, Superlearning, New York, 1979. 45. Pepper, "The Root Metaphor Theory of Metaphysics." Journal of Philosophy, 32 (July 4, 1935), pp. 365-74. An earlier related article is "Categories," University of California Publications in Philosophy, 13 (1930), pp. 7398; earlier still is the scintillating "Philosophy and Metaphor," Journal of Philosophy, 25 (March 1, 1928), pp. 130-32. See also "Middle-sized Facts," University of California Publications in Philosophy, 14 March 1932); and "How to Look for Causality -- An Example of Philosophic Method," same journal, 15 (May 1932). 46. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, translated by G. Barden and J. Cumming. New York, 1979. 47. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Translated by G. C. Spivak. Baltimore, 1977. 48. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Translated by D. F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, 1977, pp. 183-87. 49. Myra Love, "Christa Wolf and Feminism: Breaking the Patriarchal Connection." New German Critique, 16 (Winter, 1979), pp. 49-50; see also Elaine Marks, "Women and Literature in France." Sign: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 3 (Summer, 1978), pp. 832-42, a source to which love refers. 50. World Hypotheses, pp. 24-36 51. David Couzens Hoy, The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London, 1978, p. vii 52. Hoy, p. vii. 53. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by A. Sheridan. New York, 1977. 54. Jean G. Harrell, review of Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie and Richard J. Sclafani. (New York, 1977). Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36 (Spring,, 1978) p. 373. 55. "Ideals in Retrospect," p. 173. 56. Quoted in Rollo Handy, Value Theory and the Behavioral Sciences. Springfield, Ill.. 1969, p. 121. Handy's critical discussion of Pepper's value theory (pp. 120-144) had the benefit of Pepper's own comments prior to publication. (See P. 144) 57. World Hypotheses, pp. 223ff. 58. Ibid., p. vii 59. Hoy, The Critical Circle, p. 92. Gadamer freely admits that the hermeneutic method he espouses is not unconditioned by the interpreter's context and choice of context, but he places this context in an historical rather than a metaphysical framework. I am convinced, especially after hearing Gadamer speak at SUNY-Buffalo (Oct. 5, 1979), that his concept of history is actually embedded in the organicist metaphor, with Western philosophical tradition serving as a kind of ever-growing plant upon which all of us are--at one season or another--the leaves. return

60. An account of Hartshorne's criticism of Pepper and Pepper's later position is given in Andrew J. Reck, The New American Philosophers, New York, 1970. pp. 77-80. 61. Joseph H. Monast, "Evidence, Common Sense, and Metaphysical Systems: The Philosophical Methodology of Stephen C. Pepper." Doctoral thesis, Tulane, 1975. (470 pp.) Dissertation Abstracts 36, A, p. 2261. 62. "Ideals in Retrospect," p. 172. 63. Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy." New Literary History, 6 (Autumn, 1974), p. 13, Translated by F. C. T. Moore. 64. Derrida, "White Mythology," p. 71. 65. David Edge, "Technological Metaphor and Social Control," New Literary History, 6 (Autumn, 1974), p. 147. 66. Derrida, "White Mythology," p. 73. 67. Wayne C. Booth, "Metaphor As Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation." Critical Inquiry, 5 (Autumn, 1978), p. 66. 68. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd edition., Chicago, 1970, p. 135.

69. Frederick Suppe, , 2nd Edn., Urbana-Chicago-London, 1977, pp. 647-52. return

70. Suppe, p. 649. 71. Letter from Thomas S. Kuhn, Aug. 1, 1979. 72. World Hypotheses, P. 343. 73. "Autobiography of An Aesthetics," p. 286. Cf. World Hypotheses, p. 343. 74. John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and the Known. Boston, 1960, pp. 98, 187, 189-195,-203f. 75. New York, 1949, pp. 304-42. In the third edition, revised (1963), pp. 309-10. 76. New York, 1965, pp. 22-23. 77. Letter from James Laird, Aug. 7, 1979. 78. Maxine Harris, Alan F. Fontana, and Barbara Noel Dodds, "The World Hypotheses Scale: Rationale, Reliability and Validity." Journal of Personality Assessment. 41 (1977), p. 541. 79. Fontana, Dowds and Harris, "A. A. and Group Therapy for Alcoholics: An Application of the World Hypotheses Scale." Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 37 (1976) pp. 675-682. 80. Pepper, article on "Aesthetics," Encyclopedia Brittanica. Chicago, 1974, p. 158. This is part of a section on "Linguistic Approaches to Aesthetics," pp. 157-159. I am indebted to David B. Richardson for my comments on Pepper and Moore. return

81. Michael J. Shott, "Hugo Wolf's Music Criticism: A Translation and An Analysis According to Pepper's Four World Hypotheses." Doctoral thesis, Indiana, 1964. Dissertation Abstracts 25, p. 3022. For another application in music, see William G. Akers, "Implications of Stephen C. Pepper's Aesthetic Theories for Music Appreciation." Doctoral thesis, Univ. of Southern Mississippi, 1974. Diss. Abstracts, 35, Section A, p. 2744. 82. Joan W. Walls, "The Application of the Root Metaphor of Mechanism in the Psychology of David Hartley." Doctoral thesis, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1975. Diss. Abstracts, 36, Section A, p. 6906. 83. Brent S. Kilbourn, "Identifying World Views Projected by Science Teaching Materials: 'A Case Study Using Pepper's World Hypotheses to Analyze a Biology Textbook." Univ. of Toronto, 1974. Diss. Abstracts, 37, Section A, p. 2736. Additional recent applications of Pepper's world hypotheses include: E. Vallance, "The Landscape of Great Plains Experience: "An Application of Curriculum Criticism." Curriculum Inquiry, 7 (1977), pp. 87-105; William M. Dugger, Institutional and Neoclassical Economics Compared." Social Science Quarterly, 58 (1977), pp. 449-61; also Dugger's "Social Economics: One Perspective." Review of Social Economy, 35 (1977), pp. 299-310. Use of the root metaphor method in the study of religion occurs in: D. F. Duclow, "Divine Nothingness and Self-Creation in Eriugena." Journal of Religion, 57 (1977), pp. 109-22; and Donald E. Fadner, The Responsible God (Missoula, Montana, 1975). See the critical discussion of Fadner's book by J. W. Fowler; "The Responsible God: A Study of the Christian Philosophy of Niebuhr." Journal of .Religion, 57 (1977) pp. 307-13. 84. Pepper, "Feibleman's Aesthetic Theory." Studium Generale, 24 (July, 1977), pp. 660-72. 85. James K. Feibleman, "Replies to My Critics," Studium Generale, 24 (July, 1971), p. 826. return

86. Pepper, letter, Jan 1, 1968

87. Pepper, letter to David B. Richardson, March 2, 1972.

88. Edward E. Bostetter. The Romantic Ventriloquists: WordsWorth, Coleridge, Keat, Shelley, Byron. Seattle, 1963. See also Paunch #38 (March, 1974) which contains several articles on Bostetter's theory.

89. See S. P. Rosenbaum, ed., The Norton Critical Edition of James' The Ambassadors, (New York, 1964, p. 363), for a review of this mix-up.

90. Pepper, "The Criterion of Relevancy in Aesthetics: A Discussion. 1. The Alleged Circularity of the Relevancy Criterion in Art Criticism." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 16 (Dec. 1957), pp. 202-07. See the reply to this by Karl Patter, pp. 207-14, and Pepper's further comment, pp. 214-16, in the same issue. 91. Pepper, letter, Feb. 18, 1972 92. Pepper, letter to David B. Richardson, March 2, 1972. 93. William Savery, "The Significance of Dewey's Philosophy," in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul A. Schilpp, Evanston-Chicago, 1939, p. 497. 94. Dewey, "Experience, Knowledge and Value: A Rejoinder," in Schilpp, pp. 525, 560. return

95. Dewey, "Context and Thought." Reprinted in On Experience, Nature, and Freedom, ed. Richard J. Bernstein-. Indianapolis-New York, 1960, pp. 88-110.

96. Pepper, letter, Nov. 10, 1969.

97. Ibid.

98. World Hypotheses, pp. 235-36. 99. Burns had met Pepper during the late 40's, while teaching at Berkeley. Among dissertations supervised by Burns which apply Pepper's theories is one by Robert Lawyer, "Aesthetics, Criticism and the Fiction of Thomas Hardy" (1964). The concluding chapter is reprinted in Paunch #28 (Feb., 1967), as "Thomas Hardy's Jude and Obscure, pp. 5-54. In his key essay, The Panzaic Principle (Vancouver, B. C., 1972), Burns argues that the commonly held organicist interpretation of Shakespeare's history plays is saved from its own contradictions only through the intervention of formistic moral assumptions, which in turn are highly debatable. He himself argues for a contextualist (and anarchist) reading. However, one of Burns' closest students and co-workers, John Doheny, maintained that it was a mistake to try to ground Burns' argument on Pepper's aesthetics. ( Review of The Panzaic Principle, West Coast Review Jan. 1973, p. 63). 100. Pepper, "Some Questions on Dewey's Aesthetics." In The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Schilpp, pp. 369-89. 101. Dewey, "Experience, Knowledge and Value: A Rejoinder," in Schilpp, pp. 549-54. 102. James S. Ackerman, "On Judging Art Without Absolutes." Critical Inquiry, 5 (Spring, 1979), pp. 461-62. 103. Georges Dicker, Dewey's Theory of Knowing, Philadelphia, 1976, pp. 50-52 . Philosophical Monograph series, ed. Joseph Margolis). 104. World Hypotheses, pp. 232-33. 105. Ibid., pp. 236-370. 106. Journal of Philosophy, 41 (1944), pp. 337-60. 107. Pepper, The Basis of Criticism in the Arts, p. 54-55. 108. Ibid., p. 145. 10 9. Pepper, letter, June 15, 1970. 110. Ibid. 111. Pepper, letter, Aug. 29, 1970. See also Pepper's article, "Existentialism," in The Nature of Philosophical Inquiry, ed. by Joseph Bobick (Notre Dame-London, 1970), pp. 189- 211. return

112. Richard H. Laing, "An Application of a World Hypotheses Inquiry Method to Describe the Quality of the Verbal Art Critique." Doctoral thesis, Penn. State, 1976. Dissertation Abstracts, 37, Section A, P. 6904. 113. James C. Mancuso, "Current Motivational Models in the Elaboration of Personal Construct Theory." In Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, vol. 24, ed. Alvin Lanfield. Lincoln-London, 1977, p. 84.

114. Mancuso, "Current Motivational Models...," pp. 50-59; 76-92. See also William C. Coe, "The Credibility of Post- Hypnotic Amnesia: A Contextualist's View." Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 26 (1978), pp. 218-45. Coe is associated with Mancuso and Sarbin. 115. Theodore R. Sarbin, "Contextualism: A World View for Psychology." In Landfield, (cited in the note 113 above), pp. 1-41. See pp. 23-26. The book is tentatively entitled Schizophrenia: Verdict or Diagnosis? 116. To appear in Metaphilosophy. 117. David F. Hultsch, "Changing Perspectives on Basic Research In Adult Learning and Memory," Educational Gerontology, 2 (Oct.-Dec. 1977), pp. 367-82. 118. Pattern Recognition, 10 (1978), p. 191. 119. Joseph Z. Nitecki, "Metaphors of Librarianship: A Suggestion for a Metaphysical Model." Journal of Library History, Philosophy, and Comparative Librarianship, 14 (1979), pp. 21-42. 120. American Psychologist., 29 (Nov., 1974), pp. 785-795. 121. Basis of Criticism in the Arts, p. 54. 122. Pepper, "A Neural-Identity Theory of Mind." In Dimensions of Mind: A Symposium, ed. Sidney Hook. New York, 1961, pp. 47-48. From a conference held in May, 1959. 123. "A Neural-Identity Theory of Mind," p. 45. 124. World Hypotheses, p. 147. 125. Pepper, Concept and Quality: A World Hypothesis, p. 29. 126. Joseph H. Monast has argued, in fact, that the selectivism of Concept and Quality is a new and improved contextualism, and not a new world view. See his dissertation, cited in note #61 above. 127. Pepper, letter, Oct. 15, 1969. 128. Pepper, letter, Nov. 10, 1969. 129. Ibid. 130. World-Hypotheses, pp. 234-35. 131. Principles of Art Criticism, p. 138. 132. Arthur Efron, "On Learning to Evade Virginia Woolf," Paunch #52 (Oct., 1978), pp. 103-116. 133. Principle of Art Appreciation, p. 138. 134. Abraham Edel, in the article cited above, fn. #42 135. Pepper letter, June 19, 1969. 136. Concept and Quality, Acknowledgments page. 137. Herbert Feigl, "Mind-Body, Not A Pseudo-Problem." In Dimensions of Mind, p. 40. 138. Concept and Quality, p. 51. 139. Concept and Quality, section "On the Cosmic Distribution of Qualities," pp. 134-142. 140. Ibid. pp. 137-38. 141. Ibid., p. 306 142. Ibid., pp. 49-50. 143. Herbert Feigl, "No Pot of Message." In Mid-Twentieth Century American Philosophy, 1920-1970, ed. Peter A. Bertocci. (New York, 1974), pp. 137-39. return

144. Concept and Quality, pp. 75-82. Pepper's use of Penfield in order to say that felt qualities actually occur in the brain creates trouble, however, in his emphasis on the organism as a whole. I have discussed this in "The Mind-Body Problem in Lawrence, Pepper and Reich." (Unpublished) 145. Concept and Quality, pp. 28-29. 146. Pepper, letter to Joan Boyle, Dec. 15, 1971. During her correspondence with Pepper, Boyle was writing her doctoral dissertation, "The Process of Discovery: Stephen C. Pepper's Root-Metaphor Theory of Philosophy." The Catholic University of America, 1973. Dissertation Abstracts, 34, Section A, p. 1318. 147. Concept and Quality, pp. 28-29. 148. Ibid., p. 66. 149. Manfred Clynes, Sentics: The Touch of Emotions, New York, 1976. 150. For an extended argument along these lines, see Bill J. Harrell, "Marx and Critical Thought." Paunch #44-45. (May, 1976), pp. 4-80. As an indication of how Harrell's argument fares against a behavioral model espoused by one of Pepper's sympathetic commentators, see in that same issue Rollo Handy, "Comments on Harrell's 'Marx and Critical Thought'," (pp. 92-107), and Harrell's reply, pp. 174-178. Pepper's cross-cultural focus in Concept and Quality does not preclude the discrimination of culturally determined traits. The book is employed, in fact, by Michaela Lifschitz in her study, "Person, Perception and Social Interaction of Jewish and Druze Kindergarten Children in Israel." Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, 985 (1977), pp. 338-54. Tee also her article, "The Bender-Gestalt Test and Social Interactions of Kindergarten Children: Effects of Socialization Practices." Psychology in the Schools, 15 (1978), pp. 180-83. 151. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 23 (Summer, 1965), pp. 421-27. 152. Concept and Quality, p. 577. 153. "Autobiography of an Aesthetics," p. 282. 154. Concept and Quality, p. 560. 155. Ibid., pp. 411-439. Pepper considered this and the following chapter, "Logical Similarity and Formal Reality," his formal analysis of how correspondence notions of truth do have some value, but not in the commanding way that formism has given them. ("Autobiography of an Aesthetics," p. 286.) The inevitability of some sort of correspondence theory seems to be shown in recent work by the supremely skeptical Nelson Goodman. Goodman rejects the correspondence theory as such, but then introduces a flexible concept of "fit" which seems to perform many of the old correspondence tasks, and which has suggested to at least one reviewer ideas originally espoused by the greatest of formists, Plato. See Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, 1978), and the review article by J. M. Moravcsik, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 37 (Summer, 1979), p . 483- 85.

156. Concept and Quality, pp. 424-38. 157. Ibid., p. 170. return