If A, then B.
B.
Therefore, A.

The first two parts (if A, then B, and B) can be true. The fallacy comes in concluding that A is true.

He then breaks down an example from a recent post by Joe Klein at Time’s Swampland:

If [A] Gingrich is running for office, then [B] he will act dumb and angry.
[B] Gingrich is acting dumb and angry.
Therefore, [A] Gingrich is running for office.

The problem is treating material implication (If A, then B) as if it were material equivalence (B, if and only if A). As Chait explains:

Klein proceeds to elaborate that Gingrich will occasionally say something rational when not running for office. Even if we assume that this is true, this is a far weaker claim than saying that Gingrich will exclusively say rational things when not running for office. And that strong claim is necessary to infer that Gingrich is running for office from the fact that he said something dumb and angry. My view is that Gingrich says dumb, angry things constantly and without regard to electoral ambitions. [Ad hominem summation censored.]

Philosophical pragmatism is basically the idea that the concept of a thing is the concept of that thing’s effects (Peirce’s maxim), an idea more profound than it may seem. But I think the key insight of the pragmatists was to recognize the social basis of much of our thinking. Ideas are meaningful because they are part of our action plan in life. And much of what we do is organized in one way or another by relation to various social institutions, broadly construed. Economy, marriage, family, education, art, whatever. Our experience of the web of norms cast by these institutions is what we call, colloquially, “life.”

A pragmatist recognizes the import of socially constructed meaning, but without mistaking it for the straw man of anything-goes relativism. There is a reality independent of what we think about it, but what we think and do can play a major part in creating that reality.

All of which means that the law, a product of complex interactions of an array of human institutions, is neither totally dependent on what we, or our judges, think about it (simple legal realism), nor totally independent of what we think (natural law, philosophical realism). It is both, somewhat.

Yglesias also notes that people who don’t go to law school are invariably legal realists, which I suppose is probably true. I’d also note that, apart from the theoretically minded, high-achieving law students who go on to become law professors, practically all law students are legal realists. Which means that almost all lawyers are, too.

I’ve worked around the terminological confusion by simply boycotting the term—which is hopelessly two-dimensional anyway. Pragmatism, in law and in philosophy, captures the helpful insights of realism within a framework that is grounded in constructive and socially aware thinking about three-dimensional problems in a three-dimensional world.

Yglesias doesn’t think reading Kant is even “remotely pleasurable.” In fairness, this effrontery is qualified—it is only the English translations of the Kantian corpus that Yglesias pins as lacking the requisite causative properties to induce Kant-reading-pleasure, or Kantlesendervergnügen. One must reserve the possibility that he has appropriate regard for the sublime aesthetic in the original German.

Now, the question that must be answered is, how could you possibly fail to draw pleasure from artistry such as the silver-quilled Prussian displays in this excerpt from the Critique of Pure Reason:

In order to prevent any misunderstanding, it will be requisite, in the first place, to recapitulate, as clearly as possible, what our opinion is with respect to the fundamental nature of our sensuous cognition in general. We have intended, then, to say that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of phenomena; that the things which we intuit, are not in themselves the same as our representations of them in intuition, nor are their relations in themselves so constituted as they appear to us; and that if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear; and that these, as phenomena, cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. [...] Supposing that we should carry our empirical intuition even to the very highest degree of clearness, we should not thereby advance one step nearer to a knowledge of the constitution of objects as things in themselves. For we could only, at best, arrive at a complete cognition of our own mode of intuition, that is of our sensibility, and this always under the conditions originally attaching to the subject, namely, the conditions of space and time; while the question: “What are objects considered as things in themselves?” remains unanswerable even after the most thorough examination of the phenomenal world.

If that’s not poetry, I don’t know what is. It is possible that Yglesias has yet to awake from his own dogmatic slumbers to take into account that the mere repeated correlation of Kant-reading and lack-of-remote-pleasurability does not entail the absence of a causative, noumenal essence of pleasurability in Kant’s writing.

All instruction given or received by way of argument proceeds from pre-existent knowledge. This becomes evident upon a survey of all the species of such instruction. The mathematical sciences and all other speculative disciplines are acquired in this way, and so are the two forms of dialectical reasoning, syllogistic and inductive; for each of these latter make use of old knowledge to impart new, the syllogism assuming an audience that accepts its premisses, induction exhibiting the universal as implicit in the clearly known particular. Again, the persuasion exerted by rhetorical arguments is in principle the same, since they use either example, a kind of induction, or enthymeme, a form of syllogism.

- The Philosopher