Pragmatism

First published Sat Aug 16, 2008; substantive revision Mon Sep 30, 2024

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that – very broadly– understands knowing the world as inseparable from agencywithin it. This general idea has attracted a remarkably rich and attimes contrary range of interpretations, including: that allphilosophical concepts should be tested via scientificexperimentation, that a claim is true if and only if it is useful(relatedly: if a philosophical theory does not contribute directly tosocial progress then it is not worth much), that experience consistsin transacting with rather than representing nature, that articulatelanguage rests on a deep bed of shared human practices that can neverbe fully ‘made explicit’. After a brief historical survey,the first part of this entry explores the classical pragmatists’distinctive methods, and how they give rise to an originalaposteriori epistemology. After that, we briefly explore some ofthe many other areas of philosophy in which rich pragmatistcontributions have been made, both in pragmatism’s classical eraand the present day.

1. The Development of Pragmatism

1.1 The Early Years

Pragmatism originated in the United States around 1870, and nowpresents a growing third alternative to both analytic and‘Continental’ philosophical traditions worldwide. Itsfirst generation was initiated by the so-called ‘classicalpragmatists’ Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), who firstdefined and defended the view, and his close friend and colleagueWilliam James (1842–1910), who further developed and ablypopularized it. James’ Harvard colleague Josiah Royce(1855–1916), although officially allied with absolute idealism,proved a valuable interlocutor for many of these ideas, and as heincreasingly came to be influenced by Peirce’s work on signs andthe community of inquirers, was acknowledged as a fellow pragmatist byPeirce himself. A significant influence in those early years was thescientific revolution then taking place around evolutionary theory, ofwhich first generation pragmatists were keen observers and sometimeparticipants (Pearce 2020). These pragmatists focused significantly ontheorising inquiry, meaning and the nature of truth, although Jamesput these themes to work exploring truth in religion.

A second (still termed ‘classical’) generation turnedpragmatist philosophy more explicitly towards politics, education andother dimensions of social improvement, under the immense influence ofJohn Dewey (1859–1952) and his friend Jane Addams(1860–1935) – who invented the profession of social workas an expression of pragmatist ideas, and was awarded the Nobel PeacePrize in 1931. At the same time, new philosophies of race weregerminated by pioneering African-American philosophers W.E.B Du Bois(1868–1963) and Alain Locke (1885–1954), who also engagedin productive dialogue with one another. Further valuablecontributions were made at this time by George Herbert Mead(1863–1931), who contributed significantly to the socialsciences, developing pragmatist perspectives on the relations betweenthe self and the community (Mead 1934), and Mary Parker Follett whostudied with Royce and James at Radcliffe/Harvard, and also critiquedprevailing individualist ontologies, developing a concept of“power-with” rather than “power-over” ininstitutional settings (Follett 1918; 1924), whose farsightedness hasrecently been recognised (Kaag 2011).

As the progressive Deweyan ‘New Deal’ era passed away andthe US moved into the Cold War, pragmatism’s influence waschallenged, as analytic philosophy blossomed and became the dominantmethodological orientation in most Anglo-American philosophydepartments. Transitional or ‘third generation’ figuresincluded C.I. Lewis (1883–1964), the teacher of W.V.O. Quine(1908–2000) and several generations of Harvard philosophers.Lewis developed a philosophy that was a sort of pragmatist Kantianism,and in books such asMind and the World Order (1929), hedefended a pragmatist conception of thea priori, holding thatour choices of laws of logic and systems of classification should bedetermined by pragmatic criteria (Lewis 1923, 1929; Murphey 2005: ch.four and five). Although Lewis and Quine developed a number ofpragmatist themes, their analytic allegiance may be seen in theirsignificant focus on theory of knowledge as first philosophy (whichDewey deprecated as ‘the epistemological industry’).

It would be wrong to conclude that pragmatism was restricted to theUnited States. There were pragmatists in Oxford, in France and,especially, in Italy in the early years of the twentieth century(Thayer 1968, part III, Baldwin 2003: 88–9). The work of FrankRamsey at Cambridge in the 1920s (e.g. Ramsey 1926) developedPeirce’s views on statistical reasoning and inquiry in ways thatinspired fertile new research programmes (Misak 2018).Wittgenstein’s later thought also acquired a pragmatist flavourthrough conversations with Ramsey (Misak 2018; Boncompagni 2016;Goodman 2002), and his reading of James’sVarieties ofReligious Experience (1902).

1.2 ‘Neopragmatism’ and Beyond

Since the 1970s, the pragmatist tradition has undergone a significantrevival. Richard Rorty (1931–2007) turned consciously topragmatism to rectify what he saw as mainstream epistemology’scrucial mistake: naively conceiving of language and thought as‘mirroring’ the world. Rorty’s bold and iconoclasticattacks on this ‘representationalism’ birthed a so-calledneopragmatism to which a number of influential recentphilosophers have contributed. Where early pragmatists such as Peirceand Dewey created systematic philosophies, Rorty treated pragmatism asa more critical or therapeutic philosophical project. What pragmatiststeach us abouttruth, he tells us, is that there is nothingvery systematic or constructive to be said about it. In particular,the concept does not capture any metaphysical relation between ourbeliefs and utterances, on the one hand, and reality on the other. Wecan describe what wedo with the word ‘true’: weuse it to endorse beliefs and sentences, and sometimes we might findit useful to express our fallibility by saying that some of ourbeliefs may not be true. (Rorty calls this the‘cautionary’ use of the term ‘true’.) Butbeyond talking about the concept’s rather trivial formalproperties, there is nothing more to be said about it. Nor can truthbe our aim when we inquire, since we can only adopt an aim that we canrecognize has been achieved, but since we are fallible, we can neverprove that our beliefs are true – only that they meet standardsof acceptance that are endorsed, for the time being, in our community(Rorty 1982; 1991; 1998). Therefore we are free to propose new‘vocabularies’ – systems of classification anddescription. We do not test these vocabularies by seeing whether theycan be ‘read off the nature of reality’, but by seeing howthey enable us to achieve our current goals, formulate better and moresatisfying goals, and become better at being human.

Another key contributor to pragmatism’s revival was Harvardphilosopher Hilary Putnam, who at times made ambitious claims for theprospects of a ‘pragmatist enlightenment’(Putnam 2004:89–108. For a more recent articulation of similar sentiments,see Kitcher 2012). Putnam identifies four key characteristics ofpragmatism as: i) rejection of skepticism, ii) willingness to embracefallibilism, iii) rejection of dichotomies such as fact/value,mind/body, analytic/synthetic, iv) what he calls ‘the primacy ofpractice’ (Putnam 1993; 1994).

Further pragmatist revival may be found in the work of Robert Brandom.Brandom’s philosophical interests are rather different fromthose of the classical pragmatists, of whom he is quite critical(Brandom 2011). His views owe more to philosophers such as WilfridSellars and Quine, his teacher Rorty, and historical readings inthinkers such as Kant and Hegel. His concerns lie mostly withsemantics and the philosophy of language. By contrast to therepresentationalism deplored by Rorty, he develops a version ofinferentialist semantics, in order to construct accounts of ouruse of words like ‘true’ and ‘refers to’ whichare liberated from the idea that the function of thought and languageis ‘to provide a transcript of reality’. The connection topragmatism is his focus on what wedo with our practices ofmaking assertions and evaluating the assertions of others. Whatconstitutes an assertion is itsnormative pragmatics: it is thesmallest unit of language for which we can take responsibility withina ‘game of giving and asking for reasons’. Logicalrelations are explicated as entitlements to make further moves in this‘language-game’, which flow from the commitments one hasassumed through one’s previous assertions (Brandom 1994; 2000).Brandom also joins the pragmatists in denying thattruth is asubstantial property, and in seeking to construct an account ofreference which makes a difference in practice (his favored strategyis, broadly, explaining language-users’ anaphoric capacities).In (Brandom 2008) he goes further to discuss how differentvocabularies understood pragmatically might be translated into –or reduced to – one another, thereby constructing an overallaccount of the relationship between ‘saying’ and‘doing’ that he offers as a basis for reintegratinganalytic and pragmatist philosophy. Brandom’s research programhas inspired a new generation of philosophers to fruitfully combineSellarsian and pragmatist ideas (e.g. Price 2013; Sachs 2015; Levine2019; Stovall 2021).

Another notable recent foray into pragmatist-inspired normativepragmatics is found in the work of Jürgen Habermas, a philosopherfrom the Frankfurt School who has engaged with unparalleled breadthacross the landscape of 20th century philosophy. He manages to combineanalytic philosophers’ goal of systematically theorisinglanguage with a neo-Marxian and hermeneutic critique of modernity,whilst drawing on Mead’s pragmatist analysis of the self asirremediably social. His central concept ofcommunicativeaction (Habermas 1981) is advocated as a foil to theinstrumentalist rationality that he takes to be rampantly colonisingthe human ‘lifeworld’ under capitalism. Thediscourse ethics which he develops in order to scaffold an authentic communicativeaction that is free from the distortions of power and ideology owesmuch to pragmatism’s concept of the community of inquiry,although he is sceptical of Peirce’s inquiry-based analysis oftruth as overly idealised (Habermas 2003). With major contributions inpolitical philosophy, ethics, philosophy of law, aesthetics andphilosophy of religion, amongst other areas, Habermas’ influencehas reached far into the social sciences – something Dewey wouldlikely have approved.

Meanwhile, a number of self-described pragmatists have objected tocertain tenets of neopragmatism, particularly Rorty’s blithedismissal of truth as a topic better left undiscussed (Rorty 1982),and have sought to rehabilitate classical pragmatist ideals ofobjectivity. (Examples include Susan Haack, Christopher Hookway andCheryl Misak.) These philosophers are now sometimes referred to asNew Pragmatists. Yet others have worked to place pragmatistideas in a broader Western philosophical context, for instance tracingPeirce’s significant debt to Kant (Apel 1974, Gava 2014), andconnections between pragmatism and 19th century idealism (Margolis2010, Stern 2009). Meanwhile, classical pragmatism’s progressivesocial ideals lived on in some quarters, with notable contributions tophilosophy of race made by Cornel West, who advanced apropheticpragmatism drawing on both Christian and Marxian thought, andshowcasing the earlier contributions of Du Bois and Locke (e.g. West1989), while Shannon Sullivan has been a pioneer in ‘whitenessstudies’ (Sullivan 2006). A number of other liberatoryphilosophical projects in areas such as feminism (Seigfried 1996),disability studies (Keith and Keith 2013), medical ethics (Hester2001), ecology (Norton 1994; 2005, Alexander 2013), Native Americanphilosophy (Pratt 2002) and Latin American philosophy (Pappas 1998)also currently look to the pragmatist tradition as their philosophicalhome. Pragmatists have also made significant recent contributions tolegal philosophy (Sullivan 2007).

Meanwhile, increasingly pragmatism’s intellectual centre ofgravity is moving out of North America, with vibrant research networksappearing in South America, Scandinavia and more recently centralEurope and China.

2. The Meaning of Pragmatism

Pragmatism’s key ideas originated in discussions at a so-called‘Metaphysical Club’ that met in Harvard around 1870. (Fora popular history of this group, see Menand 1998.) Peirce and Jamesparticipated in these discussions along with some other philosophers,psychologists and philosophically inclined lawyers. Peirce thendeveloped these ideas in publications from the 1870s, and theyachieved prominence through a series of public lectures given by Jamesin 1898. Both James and Peirce used ‘pragmatism’ as thename of a method, principle, or ‘maxim’ for clarifyingconcepts and hypotheses and for identifying empty disputes, though weshall see significant differences in how they understood it.

The core of pragmatism as Peirce originally conceived it was thePragmatic Maxim, a rule for clarifying the meaning of hypotheses bytracing their implications for experience in specific situations. ForPeirce and James, a key application of the Maxim was clarifying theconcept oftruth. This produced a distinctive epistemologicaloutlook: a fallibilist, anti-Cartesian explication of the norms thatgovern inquiry. Within that broad outlook, though, early pragmatistssplit significantly over questions ofrealism broadly conceived– essentially, whether pragmatism should conceive itself as ascientific philosophy holding monism about truth (following Peirce),or a more broad-based alethic pluralism (following James and Dewey).This dispute was poignantly emblematized in arguments between Peirceand James which led Peirce to rename his viewpragmaticism,presenting this clarified viewpoint to the world as his new‘baby’ which was, he hoped, ‘ugly enough to be safefrom kidnappers’ (EP2: 355).

2.1 Peirce: The Pragmatic Maxim

Peirce made this canonical statement of his Pragmatic Maxim in 1878 in‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’:

Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practicalbearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, ourconception of those effects is the whole of our conception of theobject. (EP1: 132)

This offers a distinctive method for clarifying the meaning ofconcepts and the hypotheses which contain them, by identifying thepractical consequences we should expect if a given hypothesis is true.This maxim raises some questions. First: what sort of thing does itrecognize as a practical consequence? Second, what use does such amaxim have? Peirce’s first simple illustrative example urgesthat what we mean by calling somethinghard is that ‘itwill not be scratched by many other substances.’ In this way,then, I can use the concepthard in certain contexts when Iam wondering what to do, and absent such contexts, the concept isempty. The principle has something of a verificationist character:‘our idea of anythingis our idea of its sensibleeffects’ (EP1: 132). However the use of the phrase‘practical consequences’ suggests that these are to beunderstood as having implications for what we will or shoulddo. This is clear from Peirce’s later formulations, forexample:

The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total ofall general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon allthe possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon theacceptance of the symbol. (EP2: 346).

So, for instance, if I want to break a window by throwing an objectthrough it, that object needs to be hard. It is important that, asPeirce hints here, the consequences we are concerned with aregeneral and intelligible: we are to look for laws that governthe behaviour of hard things, and draw on them to develop behaviourswhich advance our goals now and in the future.

James sometimes writes as if the practical consequences of aproposition can simply be effects upon the individual believer: ifreligious belief makes me feel better, then that contributes to thepragmatic clarification of ‘God exists’. Peirce saw usesfor his maxim beyond those James had in mind. He insisted that it wasalogical principle, in a broad sense which includesscientific methodology. So for instance he used it to clarify conceptscentral to scientific reasoning such asprobability,truth, andreality. Pragmatism, described by Peirceas a ‘laboratory philosophy’, shows us how we testtheories by carrying out experiments in the expectation that if thehypothesis is not true, then the experiment will fail to have somepredetermined sensible effect.

Peirce’s description of his maxim as a logical principle isreflected in passages where he presents it as a development of adistinction that had been a staple of traditional logic texts, andfamiliar to readers of Descartes, between ideas that areclear anddistinct (EP1: 126f). Peirce understoodthe first grade of clarity about the meaning of a concept to consistin the ability to identify instances of it, without necessarily beingable to say how. He then took his philosophical contemporaries to holdthat the highest grade of clarity, distinctness, is obtained when wecan analyze a concept into its elements by providing a verbaldefinition (or, in more recent terminology, necessary and sufficientconditions for its application). Peirce complained that ‘nothingnew is ever learned by analyzing definitions’, unless we alreadyhave a clear understanding of the defining terms. He thereforeannounced that the Pragmatic Maxim enabled a higher(‘third’) grade of clarity, that supplemented the verbaldefinition with a description of how the concept is employed inpractice.

As well as treating the Pragmatic Maxim as part of a constructiveaccount of the norms that govern inquiry, Peirce, like James, gave ita negative role as a tool for demonstrating the emptiness ofapriori metaphysics. In section 3.1 we shall see how pragmaticclarification ofreality may be used to undermine a flawed‘nominalistic’ conception of reality that led to the‘copy theory of truth’, problematic Cartesiancertainty-seeking strategies in epistemology, and Kant’s conceptof a ‘thing in itself’. A more vivid non-logical exampleof using the maxim to undermine spurious metaphysical ideas wasPeirce’s early argument that the Catholic understanding oftransubstantiation was empty and incoherent, since to talk ofsomething as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being inreality blood, is senseless jargon’ (EP1: 131f). It is importantto note, however, that the Maxim is in the end only a tool forclarifying meaning; not Peirce’s theory of meaning proper. Thisis to be found in his theory of signs orsemiotic, discussedbelow (4.4).

2.2 James

When William James published a series of lectures on‘Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking’ in1907, he began by identifying ‘The Present Dilemma inPhilosophy’ (1907: 9ff), a fundamental and apparentlyirresoluble clash between two ways of thinking, which he promisedpragmatism would overcome. James begins by observing that the historyof philosophy is ‘to a great extent that of a certain clash ofhuman temperaments’: the ‘tough-minded’ and the‘tender-minded’. The tough-minded have an empiricistcommitment to experience and going by ‘the facts’, whilethe tender-minded prefera priori principles which appeal toratiocination. The tender-minded tend to be idealistic, optimistic andreligious, believing in free will, while the tough-minded arematerialist, pessimistic, irreligious, dogmatic and fatalistic.

By the early twentieth century, James notes, ‘our children… are almost born scientific’ (1907: 14f). But this hasnot weakened religious belief. People need a philosophy that is bothempiricist in its adherence to facts yet finds room for faith. Thechallenge is to show how to reconcile ‘the scientific loyalty tofacts’ with ‘the old confidence in human values and theresultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantictype.’ Pragmatism is presented as the ‘mediatingphilosophy’. Once we use the ‘pragmatic method’ toclarify our understanding of truth, of free will, or of religiousbelief the disputes – which we despaired of settlingintellectually – begin to dissolve. William James thus presentedpragmatism as a ‘method for settling metaphysical disputes thatmight otherwise be interminable.’ (1907: 28) Unless some‘practical difference’ would follow from one or the otherside’s being correct, the dispute is idle.

[T]he tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions,however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consistin anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfectclearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only considerwhat conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve– what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactionswe must prepare. (1907: 29)

The lectures explained this with a memorable illustration. On a visitto the mountains, James’ friends engage in a ‘ferociousmetaphysical dispute’ about a squirrel that was hanging on oneside of a tree trunk while a human observer was standing on the otherside:

This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by movingrapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrelmoves as fast in the opposite direction … so that never aglimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now isthis:Does the man go round the squirrel or not? (1907: 27f)

James proposed that which answer is correct depends on what you‘practically mean’ by ‘going round’. If youmean passing from north of the squirrel, east, south, then west, thenthe answer is ‘yes’. If, on the other hand, you mean infront of him, to his right, behind him, to his left, and then in frontof him again, then the answer is ‘no’. After pragmaticclarification disambiguates the question, all dispute comes to an end.So James offers his pragmatism as a technique for clarifying conceptsand hypotheses so that metaphysical disputes that appear irresolublewill be dissolved. A good example is the dispute between free will anddeterminism: once we compare the practical consequences of bothpositions we find no conflict.

As James admitted, he explained the pragmatic method through examplesrather than a detailed analysis of what it involves. He did little toexplain exactly what ‘practical consequences’ are. He alsomade no claim to originality: ‘Pragmatism represents a perfectlyfamiliar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude’,although he acknowledged that it did so ‘in a more radical andin a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed’(1907: 31). It shared with other forms of empiricism an‘anti-intellectualist tendency’ (ibid), and it recognizedthat theories (and presumably concepts) should be viewed as‘instruments, not answers to enigmas’.

3. Pragmatist Theories of Truth

Peirce and James differed in how they applied their respectivepragmatisms to clarifying the concept oftruth.Peirce’s account of truth is presented as a means tounderstanding a concept that he claimed was vital for the method ofscience:reality (3.1). James used his account to defendpluralism about truth (3.2).

3.1 Peirce on Truth and Reality

The final section of ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’addresses the concept ofreality. This concept seems clear:‘every child uses it with perfect confidence...’ Thus itreaches Peirce’s first level of meaning-clarity. A second-levelverbal definition is also readily forthcoming: ‘we may definethe real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody maythink them to be.’ But, Peirce announces, if our idea of realityis to be ‘perfectly clear’, we need to apply the PragmaticMaxim. At this stage the concept oftruth enters thediscussion: Peirce claims that the object represented in a trueproposition is our best understanding of the real. So we must turn tohis remarks about truth to see how this works.

His pragmatic clarification of truth is expressed as follows:

The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all whoinvestigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object representedin this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.(EP1: 139)

Seven years earlier, in a review of a new edition of the writings ofBerkeley, Peirce had described this way of thinking as the‘realist conception of reality’ (EP1:88–9), incontrast with a ‘nominalist conception of reality’ whichmany early modern philosophers took for granted. Nominalists assumethat the real can only be the antecedent cause of singular sensationswhich provide our evidence for beliefs about the external world. Thisnaturally leads to a certain (age-old) solipsistic skepticismconcerning whether a person can gain knowledge that transcends theirown perceptions and epistemic perspective. Peirce’s pragmatistclarification of truth offers an alternative conceptualization of‘being constrained by reality’, in terms ofconsequent convergence of opinion, through the process ofinquiry, rather than as anantecedent cause of sensations.

All this has led Peirce’s account of truth to be expressed inthe slogan:truth is the end of inquiry, where‘end’ is to be understood not as a ‘finish’(some point in time when all human questions will be settled) but as agoal, telos or final cause. This original understanding of truth hasfaced challenges that it is ‘too realist’ insofar as ittakes for granted that inquiry will converge on just one answer to anygiven question. Here Bertrand Russell asked, ‘Is this anempirical generalization from the history of research? Or is it anoptimistic belief in the perfectibility of man?’, concluding,‘Whatever interpretation we adopt, we seem committed to somevery rash assertion.’ (1939: 146). Similarly, Quine wrote,‘…we have no reason to suppose that man’s surfaceirritations even unto eternity admit of any one systematization thatis scientifically better or simpler than all possible others’(1960: 23). However, later in life Peirce urged that the hypothesis ofmonistic convergence is best viewed as aregulative hope. In1908, Peirce wrote to a friend, ‘I do not say that it isinfallibly true that there is any belief to which a person would comeif he were to carry his inquiries far enough. I only say that thatalone is what I call Truth’ (cited Haack 1976: 246).

At the same time, others have criticised Peirce’s account oftruth for not being realist enough, due to its ‘internalrealist’ definition of truth in terms of belief and inquiry. Canthere not be claims which no-one ever inquires into or believes, whichare nonetheless true? What about ‘lost facts’, such as thenumber of cakes on a tray during a long-ago party? Here Peircearguably doubles down on his fallibilism (Legg 2014: 211). How can webe sure that no amount of inquiry will settle such matters?

… it is unphilosophical to suppose that, with regard to anygiven question (which has any clear meaning), investigation would notbring forth a solution of it, if it were carried far enough…Who can be sure of what we shall not know in a few hundred years?(EP1: 140)

The objectivism of Peirce’s account of truth derives not from aworld entirely external to our minds (a famously difficult thing toknow), but from thepotential infinity of the community ofinquiry, which exposes all of our beliefs to future correction:‘reality is independent, not necessarily of thought in general,but only of what you or I or any finite number of [persons] may thinkabout it…’ (EP1: 139). By means of this mathematicalanalysis, Peirce deftly synthesises insights from traditional realismsand idealisms (Legg 2014: 212; Lane 2018).

3.2 James on Truth

James departed from Peirce in claiming that pragmatism was itself atheory of truth, and his writings on this topic rapidly becamenotorious. They are characteristically lively, offering contrastingformulations, engaging slogans, and intriguing claims which often seemto fly in the face of common sense. In his own words:

The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the wayof belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons. (1907: 42)
‘The true’, to put it very briefly, is only theexpedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient inalmost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole, ofcourse. (1907: 106)

Other formulations fill this out by giving a central role toexperience:

Ideas … become true just in so far as they help us to get intosatisfactory relation with other parts of our experience. (1907: 34)
Any idea upon which we can ride …; any idea that will carry usprosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part,linking things satisfactorily, working securely, saving labor; is truefor just so much, true in so far forth,true instrumentally.(1907: 34)

This might be taken to suggest that beliefs are made true by the factthat they enable us to make accurate predictions of the future run ofexperience, but other passages suggest that the ‘goodness ofbelief’ can take other forms. James assures us that it cancontribute to the truth of a theological proposition that it has‘a value for concrete life’ (1907: 40); and this can occurbecause the idea of God possesses a majesty which can ‘yieldreligious comfort to a most respectable class of minds’(1907:40). This suggests that a belief can be made true by the factthat holding it contributes to our happiness and fulfilment. Suchpassages may seem to support Bertrand Russell’s famous objectionthat James is committed to the truth of “Santa Clausexists” (Russell 1946: 772). This is unfair; at best, Jamesholds that the happiness that belief in Santa Claus provides istruth-relevant. He might call the belief ‘good for somuch’ but it would only be ‘wholly true’ if it didnot ‘clash with other vital benefits’. It is easy to seehow, unless it is somehow insulated from the broader effects of actingupon it, belief in Santa Claus could lead to many surprising anddisappointing experiences.

4. Pragmatist Epistemology

The pragmatists saw their epistemology as providing a return to commonsense and experience, rejecting a flawed philosophical heritage whichhad distorted the work of earlier thinkers. The errors to be overcomeinclude Cartesianism, nominalism, and the ‘copy theory oftruth’: these are all related.

4.1 Skepticism versus Fallibilism

The roots of pragmatism’s anti-skepticism can be found inPeirce’s early (1868) paper ‘Some Consequences of FourIncapacities’ (EP1: 28–30). Here he identifies‘Cartesianism’ as a philosophical pathology that lostsight of certain insights that were fundamental to scholastic thought(for all its faults), and – he argued – more suited to thephilosophical needs of his own time. The paper begins by identifyingfour problematic teachings of modern philosophy:

One can and should doubt all one’s beliefs at once.
The ultimate test of certainty lies in individualconsciousness.
The ‘multiform argumentation’ characteristic of theMiddle Ages should be replaced by a single chain of inference.
Where scholasticism consciously limited its explanatory capacity(purporting to explain only ‘all created things’),ironically, Cartesianism’s stated ambition to explain everythingrenders its own presuppositions hidden, mysterious and philosophicallydangerous.

The first, and most important of these Cartesian teachings was themethod of universal doubt, whereby we should retain only beliefs thatare absolutely certain. The test of this certainty, as Peirce nextpoints out, lies in whether the individual consciousness is satisfied.Importantly, this self-examination includes reflection on hypotheticalpossibilities: we cannot trust our perceptual beliefs, for example,because we cannot rule out that they might be produced by a dream, oran evil demon. (See Hookway 2012, ch. 2,3.) The initial pragmatistresponse is that this is a strategy that in practice we cannot carryout effectively, and there is no reason to adopt it anyway. Peirceclaims that any attempt to adopt the method of doubt will be anexercise in self-deception because we possess a variety of certaintieswhich it does not occur to uscan be questioned. So therewill be no ‘real doubt’; these beliefs will lurk in thebackground, influencing our reflection. Peirce urges us not to‘pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in ourhearts’ (EP1: 29).

It is necessary to separate some different threads in this argument.First, there is something unnatural about the Cartesian strategy.Inquiries normally occur within a context: we address particularquestions or problems, relying on background certainties that it doesnot occur to us to doubt. The Cartesian suggestion that we shouldbegin by trying to doubt everything appears to be an attempt to stepoutside of this. Second, the Cartesian strategy requires us to reflectupon each of our beliefs and ask what reason we have for holding it;skeptical challenges are then used to question the adequacy of thesereasons. This is again at odds with normal practice. Many of ourfamiliar certainties are such that we cannot offer any concrete orconvincing reason for believing them. We tend to treat our establishedbeliefs as innocent until ‘proven guilty’. The mere lackof a conclusive reason for belief does not itself provide a reason fordoubt.

Descartes, of course, might have conceded this, but responded that hisapproach is required because once we allow error to enter ourbelief-corpus we may be unable to escape from its damaging effects.His was a time of methodological ferment, and he appreciated how manyfalse beliefs he himself had acquired from his teachers. Thepragmatist response here is to question some of Descartes’assumptions about how we reason and form beliefs. First, his strategyis individualist and ‘to make single individuals absolute judgesof truth is most pernicious’. Peirce noted that the naturalsciences which were so conspicuously successful in Descartes’day took a very different approach:

In sciences in which men come to agreement, when a theory has beenbroached, it is considered to be on probation until this agreement hasbeen reached. After it is reached, the question of certainty becomesan idle one, because there is no one left who doubts it. Weindividually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophywhich we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for thecommunity of philosophers. (EP1: 29)

Peirce also questions Descartes’ understanding of reasoning inholding that we may rely on ‘a single thread of inference’that is no stronger than its weakest link:

Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, sofar as to…trust rather to the multitude and variety of itsarguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning shouldnot form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but acable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they aresufficiently numerous and intimately connected. (EP1: 29)

Where the Cartesian holds that unless we begin from premises of whichwe can be absolutely certain we may never reach the truth, thepragmatist emphasises that, when we do go wrong, further discussionand investigation can identify and eliminate errors, which is our besthope for escaping their damaging effects. The possibility of errorprovides us with reason to be ‘contrite fallibilists’, notskeptics. The focus of epistemological inquiry should not be onshowing how we can possessabsolute certainty, but on how wecan develop self-correcting methods of inquiry that makefallibleprogress.

William James makes similar observations. In ‘The Will toBelieve’, he reminds us that we have two cognitive desiderata:to obtain truth, and avoid error (James 1897: 30). The harder we tryto avoid error, the more likely we will miss out on truth; andviceversa. The method of doubtmay make sense in special caseswhere enormous weight is given to avoiding error, but only there. Oncewe recognize our practical and forced decision about the relativeimportance oftwo goods, the Cartesian strategy no longerappears the only rational one. Later, Dewey inThe Quest forCertainty similarly urged that a focus on eliminating all errorfrom our beliefs is both doomed and destructive, with the added twistof a social diagnosis of the quest itself: the uncertainty, pain andfear of much early human life led to the erection of‘priestly’ forms of knowledge which, in promising tointercede with Heavenly stability, sundereda priori theoryfroma posteriori practice, thereby enabling the knowingclasses to insulate themselves from a more humble (and realistic)empiricism. The ‘quest’ continues, however, in manydebates in contemporary mainstream epistemology.

4.2 Inquiry

Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept ofknowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of humanthought, pragmatist epistemology examinesinquiry, consideredas the process of knowledge-seeking, and how we can improve it.Pragmatist epistemologists often explore how we can inquire in aself-controlled and fruitful way, offering rich accounts of capacitiesor virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and rules orguiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account isPeirce’s classic early paper “The Fixation ofBelief”. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle toreplace doubt with ‘settled belief’, and that the onlymethod of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least someof us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequentlyreflect upon which methods of fixing belief arecorrect istheMethod of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maximdescribed above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixingbelief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’sfavored beliefs (theMethod of Tenacity), ii) accepting aninstitution’s dictates (theMethod of Authority), iii)developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set(theA Priori Method). Notable recent reinterpretations anddefenses of Peircean epistemology include (Haack 1993 and Cooke 2007).(See also Skagestad 1981.)

Dewey’s conception of inquiry, found in hisLogic: theTheory of Inquiry is also rich, and arguably more radical thanPeirce’s in its underlying ontology (ED2: 169–79). Deweysees inquiry as beginning with aproblem; it aims for‘the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminatesituation into one that is so determinate in its constituentdistinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the originalsituation into a unified whole’ (ED2: 171). As John E. Smithnotes, where ‘Peirce aimed at “fixing” belief, Deweyaimed at “fixing” the situation’ (1978: 98). It isimportant to note that here the situation isobjectivelyindeterminate, and is itself transformed by inquiry. The‘pattern of inquiry’ that Dewey describes is common to theinformation-gathering of animals, practical problem solving, commonsense investigations of our surroundings and scientific inquiry. Herecognizes that when we face a problem, our first task is tounderstand it through describing its elements and identifying theirrelations. Identifying a concrete question that we need to answer is asign that we are making progress. And the ‘logical forms’we use in the course of inquiry are understood as ideal instruments,tools that help us to transform things and resolve our problem. Thecontinuities Dewey finds between different kinds of inquiry areevidence of his naturalism and his recognition that forms ofscientific investigation can guide us in all areas of our lives. Allthe pragmatists, but most of all Dewey, challenge the sharp dichotomythat other philosophers draw between theoretical beliefs and practicaldeliberations. In some sense, all inquiry is practical, concerned withtransforming and evaluating the features of situations in which wefind ourselves. Shared inquiry directed at resolving social andpolitical problems or indeterminacies was also central toDewey’s conception of the good life and, relatedly, thedemocratic ideal: more on this below.

4.3 Pragmatist Conceptions of Experience

The Pragmatic Maxim suggests that pragmatism is a form ofempiricism (an idea recently explored further in Wilson 2016).Yet most pragmatists adopted accounts of experience and perceptionradically different from the views of mainstream empiricists from JohnLocke and David Hume to Rudolf Carnap, as well as the‘intuition’ posited by Kant. These empiricists interpretedexperience as what is sometimes (following C.I. Lewis and WilfridSellars) called ‘the given’: we are passive recipients ofdeterminate and singular ‘sense-data’. Experience providesraw material for knowledge, but does not itself have content informedby concepts, practical needs, or anything else non-sensory, and ouronly contact with the external world is through receiving suchexperiences. This way of thinking about experience can easily lead toskepticism about the so-called ‘external world’.

In different ways, Peirce, James, and Dewey all argued that experienceis far richer than this, and earlier philosophers were mistaken toclaim that we could identify ‘experiences’ as antecedentsto, or separable constituents of, cognition. We can begin withJames’radical empiricism, of which he said that‘the establishment of the pragmatist theory of truth [was] astep of first-rate importance in making [it] prevail’ (1909:6f). Its fundamental ‘postulate’ is that ‘the onlythings that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be thingsdefinable in terms drawn from experience’. But this requiresthat experience be newly understood. He announced that ‘therelations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are justas much matters of direct particular experience as the thingsthemselves.’ Relatedly, ‘the parts of experience holdtogether from next to next by relations that are themselves parts ofexperience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, noextraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in itsown right a concatenated or continuous structure.’

Peirce too emphasizes the continuous character of perceptualexperience, adding that we directly perceive external things as‘other’ to ourselves, that we can perceive necessaryconnections between objects and events, and that experience containselements of generality (citing a picture of a connected series ofcircles which can be seenas a stone wall, in the manner ofWittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit diagram). Around 1902–3,Peirce developed a complex and original theory of perception whichcombines apercept which is entirely non-cognitive, with aperceptual judgement which is structured propositionally andlies in the space of reasons. In this way he seeks to capture howperception is both immediately felt and truth-evaluable. In contrastto standard British Empiricist analyses of the relation betweenimpressions and ideas, Peirce does not claim that a perceptualjudgmentcopies its percept. Rather, itindexes it, justas a weather-cock indicates the direction of the wind. Althoughpercept and perceptual judgment are intrinsically dissimilar, overtime certain habits of association between the two are reinforced,leading them to (literally) grow in our minds and link with otherhabits. This enables percepts and perceptual judgments to mutuallyinform and correct one another, to the point where every perception isfallible and subject to reinterpretation in the light of futureperceptions (Rosenthal 1994; Wilson 2016). The end result is that, asPeirce puts it, in stark contrast to the accepted understanding ofexperience as ‘given’: ‘[n]othing at all…isabsolutely confrontitional’, although, ‘theconfrontitional is continually flowing in upon us’ (CP 7.653).

Dewey’s account of experience, which is central to his entirephilosophy, contributes an additional twist. Like Peirce, he thoughtthat experience was ‘full of inference’, but he arguablytook the notion further from the contents of individual consciousnessthan any previous pragmatist. For Dewey, experience is a processthrough which we transact with our surroundings and meet ourneeds:

Like its congeners life and history, [experience] includeswhatmen do and suffer,what they strive for, love, believe andendure, and alsohow men act and are acted upon, the ways inwhich they do and suffer, desire and enjoy, see, believe, imagine, inshort, processes ofexperiencing (LW1:18).

What we experience is shaped by our habits of expectation and there isno basis for extracting from this complex process the kind of‘thin given’ beloved of sense datum theorists. Weexperience all sorts of objects, events and processes, and just asexperience is inextricable from the ‘external’ world ofthings,Nature (its co-ordinate concept: what is experienced)is inextricable from the ‘internal’ world of concepts.

In sharp contrast to Dewey, neopragmatism no longer takes experienceas an explicit philosophical theme. Rorty began his (pre-pragmatist)philosophical career as an eliminative materialist, and the viewsurvives inPhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature, newlybolstered by Sellarsian concerns about the ‘myth of thegiven’. On this basis, Rorty declares that ‘Dewey shouldhave dropped the term “experience” rather than redefiningit… He should have agreed with Peirce that a great gulf dividessensation and cognition, [and] decided that cognition was possibleonly for language users…’ (Rorty 1998: 297). Similarly,Brandom focusses his attention exclusively on linguistic meaning(albeit in this casequa rationalist rather thanempiricist), and has famously ruled that (as ‘blasphemy’was to Oscar Wilde) ‘experience’ is ‘not one of hiswords’ (Brandom 2011: 197). This neopragmatist neglect of one ofclassical pragmatism’s central concepts has become a major pointof contention on the part of many New Pragmatists (e.g. Koopman 2007;Levine 2010, 2012; Sachs 2015).

4.4 Representations

Having discussed pragmatists’ views on the activity of inquiryand the thickness of experience, we turn to their accounts of thenature of thought. It has been common for philosophers to assume thatthe ‘content’ of a thought, judgment or proposition is akind ofintrinsic property. Perhaps it offers a‘picture’ or ‘idea’ of some state of affairs,and we can identify this content simply by reflecting upon the itemitself, and its structural properties. All pragmatists have rejectedthis idea as a key driver of an antinaturalisticCartesiandualism. Instead, they have held that the content of a thought,judgment or proposition is a matter of the role it fills in ouractivities of inquiry, and should be explained by reference to how weinterpret it or what we do with it. This shall be illustrated byconsidering three particular pragmatist views.

First, all of the classic pragmatists identified beliefs and othermental states ashabits. According to Peirce, our beliefs‘[g]uide our desires and shape our actions’ (EP1: 114).The content of a belief is determined by its role in determining ouractions. This was reflected in Peirce’s formulations of hisPragmatic Maxim. In order to be clear about the content of a conceptor hypothesis, we must reflect upon its role in determining what weshould do in the light of our desires and our background knowledge. InRobert Brandom’s terminology, the philosopher ‘makesexplicit’ aspects of our practice that are implicit in ourhabits and dispositions. The role of tacit habits of reasoning andacting in fixing our beliefs and guiding our actions is a theme thatrecurs in the work of the pragmatists, and is now finding strongechoes in recent empirically informed work on ‘4E’cognition, which is embodied, embedded, enactive and extended. (For anaccounts of this research area which explicitly engage classicalpragmatism, see Menary 2007 and Gallagher 2017.)

The second illustration concerns a passage in which James defended hisaccount of truth by urging that it was the concept used in successfulscience. He identified the ‘traditional view’ that, forearly scientists, the ‘clearness, beauty andsimplification’ provided by their theories led them to thinkthat they had deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of theAlmighty. By contrast, contemporary scientists held that ‘notheory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any of them mayfrom some point of view be useful …’. A scientific theorywas to be understood as ‘an instrument: it is designed toachieve a purpose – to facilitate action or increaseunderstanding’ (James 1907: 33). For James and Dewey, this holdsof all our concepts and theories: we treat them as instruments to bejudged by how well they achieve their intended purpose.

The third illustration comes from Peirce’s general theory ofsigns, orsemiotics, which was developed entirely independentlyof the more well-known semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure, and is oneof the most original areas of his thought. Peirce’s semioticsoffers an account of the contents of thoughts as well as language,visual media, music and any other item that can be said to havemeaning (for introductions to this area of Peirce’s thought, seeLiszka 1996; Short 2007). Unlike Saussure, Peirce insisted that thesign-relation was essentiallytriadic in structure,comprising a representation, an object and an interpretation. In otherwords: a sign is ‘about’ some object because it isunderstood, in subsequent thought, as a sign of that object. Thissubsequent thought Peirce calls the sign’sinterpretant. In understanding or interpreting a sign, we mayfeel things about it (which at times Peirce called theemotionalinterpretant), undertake actions that are rational in the light ofthe sign and the other information we possess (thedynamicinterpretant), or an indefinite number of inferences may be drawnfrom it (thelogical interpretant) (Jappy 2016). Interpretationis generally a goal-directed activity and, once again, the content ofa sign is determined by the ways in which we use it (or might doso).

A further triadic distinction deriving from Peirce’s theory ofsigns which has been influential in disciplines from Biology to MediaStudies holds between three ways in which a sign may pick out itsobject:

by resembling it (or more generally, by possessing the veryproperties that the sign aims to signify), e.g. a map
by indicating it in some brute unmediated fashion, e.g. aweather-vane signifying the wind’s direction
via some arbitrary convention that must be learned, e.g. words inEnglish.

These three kinds of signs Peirce termed:icon,indexandsymbol respectively. Meanwhile, the three ways in which asign may give rise to itsinterpretant were categorised byPeirce as:

the rheme (essentially: a term)
the proposition
the argument

Peirce continued to richly evolve and clarify his sign theory right tothe end of his life (Jappy 2016; Bellucci 2017),albeit bymeans of some rather forbidding special-purpose technical terminology.

5. Pragmatism’s Contribution in Other Areas of Philosophy

5.1 Philosophy of Religion

We have noted that a strong motivation for James’ interest inpragmatism was exploring truth in religion. He drew on his dualtraining in philosophy and psychology for his famous bookTheVarieties of Religious Experience: a unique compendium oftestimonies concerning matters such as prayer, worship and mysticalexperience. These rich personal observations present an extendedexample of the ‘radical empiricism’ introduced in 4.3.James thereby trenchantly critiqued the intellectual methods ofcontemporary theology (‘the metaphysical monster which theyoffer to our worship is an absolutely worthless invention of thescholarly mind’ (James 1902: 447)). James also advanced acelebrated argument for religious faith in his paper “The Willto Believe”: that for questions that are living, forced andmomentous (though only for those), ‘faith based on desire iscertainly a lawful, and possibly an indispensable thing’. Hethereby confronted his contemporary William Clifford’sevidentialist claim that, ‘It is wrong always, everywhere, andfor anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’(1877), generating a lively discussion which continues today (e.g.Bishop 2007; Aikin 2014).

Despite James’ efforts to tightly circumscribe hisargument’s application, Peirce objected to such concessions inepistemology, calling the paper in a letter to James, ‘a veryexaggerated utterance, such as injures a serious man very much’(Misak 2013: 64). Peirce himself evolved from an early positivisticdisdain for religious questions to producing his own theisticarguments in later life. In 1893, he published an essay entitled“Evolutionary Love”, which passionately contested thesocial Darwinism promulgated by many prominent thinkers in his era,most notably Herbert Spencer (Pearce 2020), which he called ‘TheGospel of Greed’. Here Peirce urges that amongst the three waysthe Universe may unfold: (i) by chance, (ii) deterministically, (iii)through creative love, the third path is the highest and most likelyto endure since ‘…growth comes only from love, from Iwill not say self-sacrifice, but from the ardent impulse to fulfillanother’s highest impulse’ (CP 6.289). In his final yearsPeirce produced the remarkable essay “A Neglected Argument forthe Reality of God”, where he argued for God’sreality, notexistence, to signal an ontologicalpriority of intelligible principles over efficient causes. The pieceis structured into three argumentative layers: (i) The Humble Argument(an invitation to a phenomenological experiment) which is enfolded by,(ii) The Neglected Argument (an original version of the OntologicalArgument) which is enfolded by, (iii) The Scientific Argument (aprophecy of the fullness of future scientific inquiry). Work isongoing to draw out this unique piece’s full meaning.

Dewey turned his hand to religious questions in his 1934 bookACommon Faith. Here he argued that – contrary to what manybelieve – removing faith in supernatural entities will notdestroy religion, but rather set it free from the many ‘creedsand cults’ reflecting outdated social structures that currentlysurvive fossilised inside religious institutions. Rather than beingembodied by any kind ofentity, he argued, the sacred is aphase or quality ofexperience, namely, ‘some complex ofconditions that have operated to affect an orientation inlife…that brings with it a sense of security and peace’(LW9: 13). Such conditions might equally be found in a forest or artgallery as a church or temple. Despite its sophisticated argumentationand originality, as an explication of religious life Dewey’sapproach has been considered abstract and somewhat anodyne.

5.2 Ethical and Political Philosophy

We’ve seen that philosophical pragmatism seeks to connect theoryto practice. In ethics, it can seem natural to interpret this asrecommending that normative notions be reduced to practical utility.Thus James embraced utilitarian ethics as one of the branches ofpragmatism (James 1907). Peirce, however, took a different view.Initially (around 1898) his naturalism led him to advocate asentimentalism according to which ethical questions should besettled by instinct, as our conscious reasoning is too recentlyevolved and fallible to determine ‘vitally importantmatters’. But around 1902 he began to warm towards ethicaltheorising, as he developed a philosophical architectonic which placedethics directly prior to logic, since ethics studies what is good inaction, and logic studies what is good in thought, which is a speciesof action. He noted, though, that such a ‘normativescience’ should be understood to study what goodnessis,not whether particular actions are good (by contrast to much normativeethics today) since, ‘a science cannot have for its fundamentalproblem to distribute objects among categories of its owncreation’ (CP 2.198). Recently scholars have turned with renewedinterest to developing Peirce’s ethics (e.g. Massecar 2016;Atkins 2016).

A rich and systematic early contribution to pragmatist value theorywas made by Alain Locke, who wrote, ‘the gravest problem ofcontemporary philosophy is how to ground some normative principle orcriterion of objective validity for values without resort to dogmatismand absolutism on the intellectual plane, and without falling intotheir corollaries, on the plane of social behavior and action, ofintolerance and mass coercion’ (Locke 1935: 336). Locke taughtthat the distinctive feeling-qualities that values give rise to in usare our ultimate guide in studying them, although function has animportant secondary role to play. He held the resulting axiology to bepluralist, as well as culturally relativist.

Dewey also sought to steer ethics between the traditional poles of anobjectivism derived from some kind of human-transcendent authority,and a subjectivism derived from individual preference. He believedthat both views err in granting the moral agent an identity prior tointeractions with others. For Dewey, we are more frail beings thanthis, embedded in a sociality that runs much deeper, and the purposeof moral theory is to provide constructive methods for addressinghuman problems of a particular kind: those in which we find ourselvesunable to choose between equally valuable ends, with a dearth ofsalient habits with which to cross the breach. With regard to suchquestions, much effort is required to clear away traditional ethicaltheory’s pretensions to deliver a spurious settled certainty.Progress can be made by recognising the inherent uncertainty of moralproblems and the complexities of moral experience (Hildebrand 2008:73), and being willing to inquire anew in every moral context, drawingfrom a variety of scientific disciplines, in order to lay down newintelligent habits. The evolution of Dewey’s ethical thinkingacross his long career is richly explored in (Welchman 1995). Anotable recent attempt to develop a pragmatist metaethics drawing onclassical pragmatism is (Heney 2016).

We noted above that Dewey’s ‘second generation’pragmatists turned wholeheartedly to questions concerning socialprogress, contributing significantly to the activism and reforms ofthe so-called Progressive Era (1896-1917). As such, politicalphilosophy has been an abiding interest within pragmatism. Deweyfamously thematiseddemocracy philosophically – as morethan simply a system of government, rather, an ideal of egalitarianismand open communication which calls forth the potential contributionsof every person to the greater good, and should equally be reached forin civil society, workplaces and schools (more on the last below). Farfrom a jingoistic apologist, Dewey was strongly critical of USdemocracy, arguing in support of a socialised economy, particularlyduring the Great Depression. He claimed that US adherence to classicalliberal individualism grievously misunderstands how we become personsonly in relation to one another, and the state can be said torepresent us only so far as we ‘are possessed of unity ofpurpose and interest’ (EW1: 232. See also Westbrook 1991).Although Dewey’s democratic ideal received strongcontemporaneous critique from ‘realists’ such as WalterLippman and F.A. Hayek, some of his ideas find expression today intheories ofdeliberative democracy, which descend in part from‘neopragmatist’ Habermas. A notable example is ChristopherAnsell’s proposal for a new ‘problem-solvingdemocracy’ (Ansell 2011. See also Westbrook 2005). Otherpragmatist political philosophers advocate for Peirce’s morerealist conception of inquiry over Dewey’s, as a superior groundfor democratic deliberation (Hoopes 1998; Misak 1999; Talisse 2008).For a useful comparative summary of the political philosophies ofmajor pragmatist thinkers, see (Festenstein 1997). For recent work onpragmatist approaches to justice, see (Dieleman et al 2017). As notedearlier, pragmatist philosophers may be found advocating for manycontemporary liberatory projects (for a recent example, see McBride2021).

5.3 Aesthetics

When (around 1902) Peirce defined ethics as a normative sciencedirectly prior to logic, he also defined aesthetics as a normativescience directly prior to ethics (since aesthetics studies goodness inand of itself, which may then be used to understand good action). Thisfocus on the intrinsically good or admirable broadens the purview ofaesthetics, which Peirce claims ‘has been handicapped by thedefinition of it as the theory of beauty’ (CP 2.199, 1902).Aesthetics is one of the least well worked-out areas of Peirce’sphilosophy; nevertheless he says some intriguing and suggestive thingsabout it. For instance he argues that the so-calledsummumbonum (ultimate good) really consists in the growth of‘concrete reasonableness’ (CP 1.602; 1.615; 2.34; 5.121;5.433), as the only phenomenon ‘whose admirableness is not dueto an ulterior reason’ must be the furthering of Reason itself(CP 1.615, 1903). Recent further development of this frameworkincludes (Kaag 2014; Gava 2014).

James did not make sustained contributions to aesthetics, but Deweydid, particularly in his 1934 bookArt as Experience. Deweyviewed aesthetic appreciation as a peak human experience and‘the greatest intellectual achievement in the history ofhumanity’ (LW10:31, cited in Hildebrand 2008: 146). Consequentlythe most important question in this area of philosophy is not how todefine necessary and sufficient conditions for Art, but how to enableordinary people to enjoy more of it, so that their lives might be moremeaningful. The way forward, Dewey suggested, is to learn to fetishizeprofessionally-curated contexts and Art objects less, in order to openour eyes to consummatory experiences as they occur in the everydayexperience of the ‘live creature’. Examples of suchconsummations include: ‘[a] piece of work is finished in a waythat is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game isplayed through…’ (LW10:42). In contrast to suchintegrated completions within experience, both hedonistic dissipationand rigid self-control count as ‘anesthetic’. True artalternates between doing and undergoing. Notable recent work buildingon Dewey’s aesthetics includes Richard Shusterman’ssomaesthetics, which extends pragmatism’s defininginterest in agency to exploring the complex role of the human body inaesthetic experience (Shusterman 1992; 2012).

5.4 Philosophy of Education

Peirce had some insightful things to say about pedagogy whichanticipate today’s ‘inquiry-based learning’ and‘research-led teaching’, but they are scattered across hiswritings (Strand 2005). The giant figure in philosophy of education isof course Dewey, who pioneered it as a separate sphere of study whenhe assumed the philosophy chair at University of Chicago in 1894. Itis important to note that this key move of Dewey’s took place ina much broader context of reform-oriented, hands-on ‘experimentsin living’ by pragmatist-aligned thinkers and activists, many ofwhom were female political and educational reformers (Gordon 1990). Anoutstanding example is Jane Addams, who in 1889, with Ellen GatesStarr, established Hull House in an impoverished immigrantneighborhood of Chicago. Here, as part of a wider discovery of thepossibilities of social work, Addams innovated a pedagogy which usedstudents’ own experiences as starting points for learning(Addams 1985; Fischer 2006; 2019; Knight 2005; 2010). Hull Houseexercised a crucial influence on the Laboratory School that Deweylater (1896) opened at University of Chicago with the help of hiswife, Alice Chipman Dewey. W.E.B. DuBois also made significant contributions to the settlement movement: he was hired that same year by the University of Pennsylvania in connection with the Philadelphia College Settlement in order to study ‘the social condition of the colored people of the SeventhWard of Philadelphia’ (Pearce 2020: 266). It is worth pondering theconsonance of these ventures with pragmatism’s teachings onclosing the gap between theory and lived experience, and asking whatmay have led pragmatist philosophers back to the text-based, scholarlyapproaches we largely see today.

Dewey’s career as philosopher of education coincided with aperiod in which North America’s population was rapidly growing,industrializing and urbanizing, shifting education delivery out of thehome into public institutions, and his ideas had enormous impact. Manyof his suggestions derive from his (aforementioned) vision ofdemocracy as not merely a system of voting, but the idea that everysocietal institution might be designed to foster maximum flourishingin every citizen. Viewed from this angle, traditional modes ofschooling whereby teachers deliver an approved (oftenemployer-sanctioned) set of ‘facts’ for children tomemorise count as despotic. Instead the emphasis should be on enablingchildren to grow from within, according to their present interests andcapabilities, and become lifelong learners, although Dewey equallycriticises certain romantic, ‘child-centred’ educationaltheorists of his day for neglecting to direct or guide thechild’s interests in any particular direction (Hildebrand 2008:127). It’s also worth noting that Dewey sees education asprimarily a social not an individual process since, as noted above, heviews human identity-formation as irremediably social.

The result is a ‘problem-centred pedagogy’ which looks topragmatist epistemology understood as theory of inquiry for itsstructure. The teacher begins by facilitating contact with somephenomenon which proves genuinely puzzling to the students, thenguides them through a process which (if all goes well) resolves theproblematic situation to the satisfaction of all present. This‘cycle of inquiry’ was formalised and developed further byDewey’s student Matthew Lipman as the basis of a worldwidePhilosophy for Children movement (Lipman et al 1977). It includes asstages: articulating the problem and questions which might need to beanswered in its resolution, gathering data, suggesting hypotheseswhich might potentially resolve the problem, and testing or otherwiseevaluating those hypotheses. Opening up the classroom to such‘live’ thinking generates unpredictability which can bechallenging for the teacher to manage, but if the genuineindeterminacy of the problematic situation can be successfullynavigated, the reward will be students who have learned not just howtoknow, but how tothink. In that regard, Dewey claimedthat his writings on education summed up his entire philosophicalposition (Hildebrand 2008: 124). For Dewey, all philosophy wasphilosophy of education.

Bibliography

Primary Texts of Classical Pragmatists

For reasons of space, preference is given to comprehensive collectionsand critical editions.

Addams, J., 1910 [1990],Twenty Years at Hull House, withAutobiographical Notes, Urbana, IL: University of IllinoisPress.
–––, 1902 [2002],Democracy and SocialEthics, edited with introduction by C. H. Seigfried, Urbana, IL:University of Illinois Press.
–––, 1922 [2003],Peace and Bread in Time ofWar: Jane Addams’s Writings on Peace, edited withintroductions by M. Fischer and J. Whipps, Bristol: ThoemmesPress.
–––, 1985 [revised 1994].On Education,collection of essays edited by E.C. Lagemann, New Brunswick, NJ:Transaction Publishers.
–––, 2002.The Jane Addams Reader,edited by J.B. Elstain, New York: Basic Books.
Dewey, J., 1999.The Essential Dewey (two volumes editedby Hickman, L. and Alexander, T.), Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1999. (When possible, references to Dewey’s writings aregiven to this collection. They take the form EDn:m– to pagem of volumen)
–––, 1981–91.John Dewey: The LaterWorks, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.(References to Dewey’s writings in this collection take the formLWn:m – to pagem of volumen)
DuBois, W.E.B., 2007.The Oxford W.E.B. DuBois, (nineteenvolumes edited by Gates Jr, H.L.), Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.
Follett, M.P., 1918.The New State: Group Organization, theSolution of Popular Government, New York: Longmans, Green.
–––, 1924 [1951].Creative Experience,New York: Peter Smith Publishers.
James, W., 1890.The Principles of Psychology, Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
–––, 1897.The Will to Believe and OtherPopular Essays in Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1979.
–––, 1902.The Varieties of ReligiousExperience, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1902.
–––, 1907.Pragmatism: A New Name for someOld Ways of Thinking, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1975.
–––, 1909.The Meaning of Truth,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Locke, A., 1989.The Philosophy of Alain Locke: HarlemRenaissance and Beyond, edited by L. Harris, Philadelphia: TempleUniversity Press.
Mead, G.H., 1934.Mind, Self and Society, Chicago:University of Chicago Press
–––, 2011.G.H. Mead: A Reader, editedby F.C. da Silva, New York: Routledge.
Peirce, C.S., 1992 and 1999.The Essential Peirce (twovolumes edited by the Peirce Edition Project), Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press. (References to Peirce’s writings in thiscollection take the formEPn:m– to pagem of volumen)
–––, 1982–.Writings of Charles S.Peirce (a critical edition of Peirce’s entire oeuvre,arranged chronologically and edited by the Peirce Edition Project. Sofar 8 volumes have been released, covering the time-period up to1892), Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
–––, 1976.New Elements of Mathematicsed. Eisele, C. (Peirce’s writings on mathematics and relatedtopics: four volumes in five books), The Hague: Mouton, HumanitiesPress (reprinted in 2011 by De Gruyter).
–––, 1931–1958.Collected Papers, vol.1–7 ed. Hartshorne, C., and Weiss, P., vol 8 ed. Burks, A..Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (References toPeirce’s writings in this collection take the formCPn.m – to paragraphm of volumen)

Royce, J., 1897 [2000].The Conception of God, New York:Macmillan; new edition with introduction by R.E. Auxier, Bristol:Thoemmes Press.
–––, 1901 [1976].The World and theIndividual, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.
–––, 1908 [1995].The Philosophy ofLoyalty, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
–––, 2005.The Basic Writings of JosiahRoyce, two volumes edited by J.J. McDermott, New York: FordhamUniversity Press.

Collections of Papers by Classic and Contemporary Pragmatists.

Goodman, R. (ed.), 1995.Pragmatism, London:Routledge.
––– (ed.), 2005.Pragmatism: CriticalConcepts in Philosophy (four volumes covering: volume one:Pragmatism’s first decade; volume two: metaphysics andepistemology; volume three: moral and political issues; volume four:neopragmatism and aesthetics). London: Routledge.
Haack, S. and Lane, R. (eds.), 2006.Pragmatism, Old and New:Selected Writings, Amherst NY: Prometheus.
Menand, L. (ed.), 1998.Pragmatism, New York: RandomHouse.
Stuhr, J.J. (ed.), 1999.Pragmatism and Classical AmericanPhilosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretive Essays, New York:Oxford University Press.
Talisse, R. and Aikin, S. (eds.), 2011.The Pragmatism Reader:From Peirce through the Present, Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.
Thayer, H.S. (ed.), 1982.Pragmatism: The ClassicWritings, Hackett.

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