What is Pragmatism’s Language and Experience Debate Really About?

Abstract One of contemporary pragmatism’s most lively intramural debates is about the status, priority, and emphasis that pragmatism should place on experience, on the one hand, versus language, on the other. Recently, an experientialist pragmatist has argued that the experience–language debate is not ‘really’ about issues of language and experience, but is rather a proxy for another issue: namely, pragmatism’s stance toward the practical world of everyday life and commitment to improving it. In other words, a commitment to meliorism . In this paper I argue that this strategy for cornering the linguistic pragmatist does not work, and that meliorism is not what the language versus experience debate is ‘really about’. First, I argue that the debate is not a proxy for a debate about meliorism, but rather is about exactly what it purports to be about: the place of language and experience in an account of the most basic features of what it is to be the kind of beings we are in the world in which we live. Second, I argue that one’s stance toward meliorism need not covary with whether one embraces either linguistic or experientialist pragmatism. Finally, I argue that to think that pragmatism must begin with meliorism is to put the cart before the horse. My aim is to clarify the import of the experience–language debate and direct the future of that debate back towards other, more fruitful paths recently opened up: those whose destination is overcoming the dichotomy by finding the right way to combine the best insights of both sides of the debate.