Home / Blog / A Cable of Many Fibers: An Overview of Pragmatism for Graduate Students in the Humanities and Social Sciences
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Abstract #
Pragmatism is the philosophical tradition graduate students are most likely to have absorbed without being taught, since it stands behind a good deal of what the humanities and social sciences now take for granted: that concepts earn their keep by their consequences, that inquiry is a social and self-correcting practice, and that theories are tools rather than mirrors of a finished reality. This essay offers an overview for researchers who are not philosophers. I proceed in six movements: the founding maxim and its theory of belief; the three classical figures (Peirce, James, Dewey) and the fourth the social sciences claim (Mead); the tradition's quarrel with Cartesianism and its account of truth; the lineages the textbook story omits (women, Black intellectuals, and the "American" adjective itself); the mid-century decline and the neopragmatist revival; and the uses and criticisms that matter for research today. My argument throughout is that pragmatism is best received not as a doctrine to adopt but, in Peirce's own image, as a cable whose fibers, "ever so slender," hold only because they are "numerous and intimately connected."
1. The Problem of the Name #
In 1908 Arthur O. Lovejoy counted the pragmatisms then in circulation and found thirteen, "a baker's dozen of contentions which are separate not merely in the sense of being discriminable, but in the sense of being logically independent." The pragmatist, he concluded, "is not merely three but many gentlemen at once."[1] F. C. S. Schiller, himself one of the gentlemen, thought Lovejoy had "grossly understated" the number.[2] More than a century later the count has only grown. The graduate student who meets pragmatism in a theory seminar or a methods chapter meets it in exactly this condition: as an adjective attached to "mixed methods," a footnote behind "grounded theory," a name dropped alongside Rorty, Habermas, or Cornel West, a rumor that some school of American philosophy licensed the interpretive turn. The rumor is true, and the school is real, but it was never one thing, and the plurality is a feature rather than a defect. Richard Bernstein's summary has become the scholarly commonplace: "from the very beginning, pragmatism has been an essentially contested concept," so that "the meaning and history of pragmatism are themselves constituted by these contestations."[3]
I aim to make the contest legible. In this essay I will argue that pragmatism is best approached as a method with a history rather than a creed with adherents, and that three commitments carry most of its weight across all its versions: that the meaning of a concept and the content of a belief lie in the habits of action they produce and the consequences by which they are tested; that inquiry begins in genuine doubt and ends in the provisional, revisable agreement of a community of inquirers; and that truth is something that happens to ideas in the course of inquiry rather than a static correspondence they either have or lack. Everything else, including the disagreements that gave Lovejoy his thirteen, can be understood as the working out of these three under different pressures. I write as a scholar of religion, but I hope that this overview will be useful for the historian, the sociologist, the ethnographer, the literary critic, the educator, and the political theorist as much as for the religion scholar.
2. The Maxim and the Theory of Belief #
Pragmatism has a birthday, a birthplace, and a paternity dispute, and it is worth having all three straight before the ideas, because the ideas were forged in the dispute. The birthday is 26 August 1898, when William James (1842–1910) told the Philosophical Union at Berkeley about "the principle of practicalism—or pragmatism, as he called it," crediting the idea to "Mr. Charles S. Peirce" and dating it to Cambridge in the early 1870s.[4] The birthplace, if we trust Peirce's late and uncorroborated recollection, is the Metaphysical Club, "a knot of us young men in Old Cambridge, calling ourselves, half-ironically, half-defiantly, 'The Metaphysical Club.'"[5] The paternity dispute is between Peirce and James and was never settled; Louis Menand's version is the cruelest ("William James invented pragmatism as a favor to Charles Peirce. Peirce needed one"), and Peirce's own, in 1905, was to disown the child and "announce the birth of the word 'pragmaticism,' which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers."[6]
Beneath the quarrel lies a single maxim, and the maxim is the one thing every pragmatist shares. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) stated it in 1878: "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."[7] The maxim is a rule for clarifying the meaning of concepts, not a theory of truth and emphatically not a license to believe whatever proves handy. Its logic rests on a prior theory of belief that Peirce took, by his own account, from the Scottish psychologist Alexander Bain, for whom belief is "that upon which a man is prepared to act": "The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise."[8] Two beliefs that would issue in identical conduct under every conceivable circumstance are, for Peirce, the same belief however differently they feel, because "what a thing means is simply what habits it involves."[9] The instrument was meant to be sharp: Peirce's own test case was the doctrine of transubstantiation, and his verdict that "to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon" shows how much metaphysics he expected it to dissolve.[10]
For a researcher, the maxim is immediately usable, and this is the first thing to take from pragmatism. Take the load-bearing term of a dissertation (secularization, resilience, agency, the sacred, neoliberalism, social capital) and ask what observable difference it would make if the term applied and if it did not. Where the difference cannot be stated, the pragmatist suspects a word rather than a concept; where two of your terms pass the test identically, you have one concept wearing two names. This is not positivism. Peirce's maxim asks about conceivable practical bearings, which include bearings on how a community of inquirers would proceed, and it was designed to keep metaphysics honest rather than to abolish it. James restated the maxim so that it applied to the meaning of truths rather than concepts, tying meaning to "the conduct it dictates or inspires," and M. Gail Hamner's summary of the resulting divergence is the cleanest I know: "The Jamesian maxim seeks the meaning of truths while the Peircean one simply seeks the meaning of ideas or concepts."[11] John Dewey (1859–1952), who preferred to call his own position instrumentalism, boiled it down to a working rule: "the term 'pragmatic' means only the rule of referring all thinking, all reflective considerations, to consequences for final meaning and test."[12]
3. Three Founders and a Fourth #
The classical tradition is usually told as a trio, and each member pulls the shared maxim in a different direction.
Peirce was a logician and a working scientist for the U.S. Coast Survey who lost his one academic post and died poor. There is an instructive irony in the fact that the philosopher of community was, as Hamner notes, forcibly alienated "from the 'communities of inquiry' that mattered most to him."[13] Three of his ideas anchor the tradition. The first is his anti-Cartesianism: "We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy"; "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts."[14] The second is fallibilism joined to a realist conception of truth as a limit: "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth," a conception that "essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge."[15] Truth is real but never possessed; the community approaches it asymptotically, and "the individual man . . . is only a negation."[16] The third is the doubt–belief model of inquiry: "The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle Inquiry," which ends only with the settlement of opinion, and "There must be a real and living doubt, and without this all discussion is idle."[17] Against the anti-foundationalist reputation later hung on the movement, Peirce also insisted on "the truth of scholastic realism," the claim that general kinds, laws, and habits are real features of the world and not mere names for collections of particulars.[18]
James was a psychologist before he was a philosopher, author of The Principles of Psychology (1890) before Pragmatism (1907), and he moved the tradition's center of gravity from logic to lived experience. His theory of truth is the one students most often meet in caricature: truth is "the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons."[19] Cornel West's gloss is fair: "James demotes truth without eliminating it; he temporalizes knowledge and links it to human satisfaction and success."[20] Where Peirce's pragmatism is communal and logical, James's is individualist and voluntarist; in Hamner's accounting, will is central to James and "almost completely absent in Peirce," so that "for James, purpose is imposed, either by individual will or by a consciousness connected to and superseding the individual."[21] The individualism has a religious shape. James's working definition of religion, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), was "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine," and his "The Will to Believe" (1896) defended[22] the right to believe ahead of conclusive evidence, which made pragmatism attractive to the religiously serious and suspect to the scientifically strict. His student W. E. B. Du Bois entered the standing caveat: "the Jamesian Pragmatism as I understood it from his lips was not based on the 'usefulness' of a hypothesis but on its workable logic if its truth was assumed."[23] That is the sentence to keep when a colleague says pragmatism means believing what is convenient.
Dewey is the pragmatist the social sciences and the professional schools actually inherited, because he refused to separate the theory of knowledge from the theories of education and democracy. His Chicago title, Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and Pedagogy, was not an accident of administration.[24] Pragmatism, he wrote, "represents what Mr. Peirce has happily termed the 'laboratory habit of mind' extended into every area where inquiry may fruitfully be carried on"; it "is content to take its stand with science" but "also takes its stand with daily life."[25] Deweyan inquiry begins in a problematic situation, moves through hypotheses tested by their consequences, and ends not in Truth with a capital letter but in what he called warranted assertibility, a conclusion the community of inquiry is presently entitled to assert. Its aim is reconstructive: instrumentalism seeks to modify "future facts and events" so that they become "more adequate to the ends which we propose for ourselves," and its "ideal element" grows "more and more accentuated by the inclusion progressively of social factors in human environment."[26] Dewey's warning to theorists has lost none of its bite: "The intellectual enterprise which turns its back upon the matters of common sense, in the connection of the latter with the concerns of living, does so at its peril."[27] Late in life he called Peirce "the most original philosophical mind produced by this country" and placed himself between the founders: "Peirce was above all a logician . . . whereas James was an educator and humanist."[28]
The fourth figure, indispensable for social scientists, is George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), whose theory of the social self ("mind develops and has its being only in and by virtue of the social process of experience and activity") became the philosophical charter of symbolic interactionism.[29] Here a caution belongs in the overview, because it exposes the deepest fault line in the tradition. Nominalists hold that only particulars are real; realists hold that general kinds and social facts are real too. J. David Lewis and Richard L. Smith argued in 1980 that "Peirce and Mead proposed a social realist theory of mind, meaning, and conduct, whereas James and Dewey were mainly nominalistic with occasional lapses into realism," and that Mead was in fact marginal to the Chicago sociology that later claimed him as its founder.[30] Their revision is contested, but the lesson holds regardless: the pragmatists split over the oldest question in metaphysics, whether generals are real, and that split runs through every social science that has drawn on them. "Either there are social facts, or there are not," Lewis and Smith write; "It is a clear 'yes' or 'no' question," and the pragmatist tradition gives both answers.[31]
4. Against Descartes, and the Trouble with Truth #
It is easier to state what pragmatism opposes than what it holds, and Hamner notices that this negativity is much of its present appeal: "what seems to attract contemporary thinkers to American pragmatism is everything it purports to be against: ostensibly, it is anti-universalist, anti-authoritarian, anti-Cartesian, anti-essentializing, and antirepresentational."[32] The list is accurate. Pragmatism rejects the Cartesian picture of a mind that first secures its own certainty in private and then reaches out to a world; it rejects the spectator theory of knowledge, in which the knower watches a finished reality rather than acting within an unfinished one; and it rejects the dualisms of mind and body, fact and value, theory and practice. That last refusal is why, as Nick Rumens and Mihaela Kelemen observe, pragmatism ought to have appealed to feminist theory sooner than it did, since "it has been feminists who have vociferously criticised Cartesian philosophy for sustaining harmful dichotomies, not the least of them being linking reason with masculinity, and emotion with femininity."[33] Sandra Rosenthal names the resulting position "the other naturalism," a naturalism that takes scientific method as its model without smuggling in the content of any particular science as metaphysics, so that "beliefs are justified not by their origins but by their consequences, their results, their fruits, by their reliability in producing anticipations that are fulfilled in the ongoing course of experience."[34]
Two misreadings of the theory of truth deserve naming, because every graduate student will meet both. The first is that pragmatism means expedience, that "true" means "useful to believe." Du Bois refuted this in 1911, in a passage Nancy Muller Milligan reads as aimed at Booker T. Washington: "There could be no more dangerous social pragmatism. Its basic assumption is that the facts are in reality known, while its whole action prevents the facts from being known."[35] A pragmatism that blocks inquiry in the name of results violates the very maxim Peirce called the corollary of the first rule of reason, "Do not block the way of inquiry," and is no pragmatism at all.[36] The second misreading runs the opposite way: that pragmatism, because it is anti-foundational, dispenses with truth entirely. Here the classical figures and their heirs part company, and the student should know it. For Peirce and Dewey, inquiry remains constrained by a reality that pushes back and by a community that must be answerable to evidence; truth is deferred, not dissolved. The stronger deflation belongs to the later Rorty, to whom I return below.
5. The Lineages the Textbook Omits #
The standard story runs Peirce, James, Dewey, decline, and Rortyan resurrection, in a straight patrilineal line. Deborah Whitehead has shown that this "dominant neopragmatist narrative that recounts pragmatism's glory days, decline, and contemporary resurrection" simplifies "what was actually historically and intellectually quite complex" and "displaces other narratives."[37] A responsible overview restores at least four of the displaced ones.
The first is women's pragmatism. Charlene Haddock Seigfried's Pragmatism and Feminism (1996) recovered Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ella Flagg Young, Jessie Taft, and Christine Ladd-Franklin. They argued that they "were excluded from the history of American philosophy primarily because they were excluded from the faculties of philosophy departments." Her verdict is the one to carry: "Pragmatism never disappeared. It was marginalized."[38] Addams's Hull House (founded 1889) was, in Rumens and Kelemen's phrase, "a pragmatist experiment in neighborhood activism," and Addams, "unlike many of her male pragmatist contemporaries, explicitly acknowledged the value of women's insights and experiences."[39] The recovery matters methodologically as well as historically, because the pragmatist-feminist synthesis these scholars build treats lived experience as evidence and grounds inquiry in the standpoint of the marginalized.
The second is Black pragmatism. Du Bois trained with James at Harvard and testified that James "turned me back from the lovely but sterile land of philosophic speculation, to the social sciences as a field for gathering and interpreting that body of fact which would apply to my program for the Negro."[40] The Philadelphia Negro (1899) is, on Milligan's reading, pragmatist social science in practice: empirical inquiry deployed as a corrective to racist pseudo-science, joined to a conviction recorded in Du Bois's Harvard philosophy notebook that "the whole question of knowledge rests on a teleological postulate: that it is our duty to know."[41] West's The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989) placed Du Bois in the lineage as "the Jamesian organic intellectual." From him West built a "prophetic pragmatism" that would "recapture Emerson's sense of vision—his utopian impulse—yet rechannel it through Dewey's conception of creative democracy and Du Bois' social structural analysis of the limits of capitalist democracy."[42] West's own compressed definition of the tradition is worth carrying into any discipline: pragmatism is "a continuous cultural commentary" whose "common denominator consists of a future-oriented instrumentalism that tries to deploy thought as a weapon to enable more effective action."[43]
The third displaced narrative concerns the adjective "American" itself. Pragmatism has been called "the unique contribution American philosophy has made to the tradition known as Western philosophy" and "America's 'first indigenous philosophy,'" and Hamner's American Pragmatism: A Religious Genealogy (2003) is, so far as I know, the first book to press the obvious question: "But what is American about American pragmatism?"[44] She answers that the pragmatists' "primary, question-setting interlocutors" were "not American, but European." The concepts they worked with (consciousness, causality, will, belief) came from German physiological psychology and Scottish common-sense philosophy, and what made the result feel American was "an insistent, nondoctrinal Puritan legacy" that transmuted borrowed scientific concepts "into concepts that function religiously."[45] David Hollinger had already observed that the pragmatism of the best scholarship "derives less from the unique, supposedly practical exigencies of American life than from a text of Immanuel Kant," and that among the tradition's achievements "not the least of these acts was the persuading of a great many people that pragmatism was an emblem for America."[46]
The fourth narrative follows directly, and it is the one my own field will not let me pass over. Whitehead reads James's Berkeley debut against the Spanish–American War then underway, in which James hoped that "on this wonderful Pacific Coast, of which our race is taking possession, the principle of practicalism . . . will come to its rights," and against Scott Pratt's argument that pragmatism's deeper origins lie in "the colonial encounter between Native Americans and non-native European settlers."[47] Her corrective ought to accompany every scholarly use of the word indigenous in this literature: "far from being an empty 'wilderness,' America was a land already occupied and populated by native peoples with their own traditions of thought, commerce, and governance," so that the pragmatist-as-Columbus in James's lecture "is not actually discovering something new but stumbling more or less accidentally on something that already has its own long history."[48] The rhetorical move by which an imported philosophy is declared native to a continent is the same move by which occupied land became discovered land; it is the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, the legal fiction underwriting title by arrival, performed at the level of intellectual history.
6. Decline, Revival, and the Neopragmatists #
Between roughly 1940 and 1970 pragmatism fell out of professional fashion, eclipsed in Anglophone philosophy departments by logical positivism and then by the analytic philosophy of language, and displaced in the public mind by existentialism and, later, by French theory. Hollinger wrote his 1980 essay precisely to mark the disappearance: "In 1980, 'pragmatism' is a concept most American historians have proved they can get along without," and what had vanished was "a particular sense of the significance of pragmatism," the sense that Peirce, James, and Dewey "were somehow representative of the life of the mind in the United States."[49] The decline was never total (Mead's students carried Deweyan and Meadian ideas into sociology as symbolic interactionism, and C. I. Lewis carried Peircean themes into the theory of knowledge), but as a self-conscious movement pragmatism went quiet.
Its revival is conventionally dated to Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and consolidated in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and Rorty is the pragmatist most humanists now know first, which makes him worth handling with care. For Rorty, "'truth' is just the name of a property which all true statements share," about which "there is [not] much to be said," and "modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds; it just plain enables us to cope."[50] Criteria of inquiry are "temporary resting-places constructed for specific utilitarian ends," and, in his most quoted formula, "there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves."[51] Rorty's pragmatism "views science as one genre of literature—or, put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries," and it was exactly this leveling that endeared him to literary and cultural theorists.[52] But the student should see what Rorty does to the founders. Joseph Margolis observes that Rorty "has almost nothing to say about Peirce, and what he says is hardly complimentary."[53] The neopragmatism most humanities readers inherit is James and Dewey with the logician surgically removed, a tradition shorn of Peirce's realism and his constrained, community-answerable theory of inquiry. Read Rorty by all means, and then read the Peirce he skipped; the difference between them is the difference between a pragmatism that keeps truth on a long tether and one that lets it go. The revival was broader than Rorty. It included figures who resisted his deflation from within pragmatism itself, and the recovery projects already described (Seigfried on women, West and others on Black intellectuals, Pratt on Indigenous sources) belong to the same revival, correcting the canon even as they enlarged it.
7. What Pragmatism Offers Research, and Where It Fails #
The overview should end with the pragmatist question, which is the practical one: what difference does any of this make to work in the humanities and social sciences?
First, a discipline for concepts. The maxim gives a researcher a test for the terms a project is built on that no citation manager can supply. Second, a theory of inquiry that matches what interpretive researchers actually do. Dewey's model (a problematic situation, a felt doubt, hypotheses tried against consequences, a warranted but revisable conclusion held by a community) describes qualitative fieldwork, archival research, and close reading far better than the hypothesis-then-test schema most methods textbooks still teach. It is the acknowledged philosophical ground of the "pragmatist" paradigm in mixed-methods research, of symbolic interactionism in sociology, and of the recent turn to abductive analysis in ethnography. Rumens and Kelemen build an explicitly "pragmatist-feminist ethnography" on it, treating knowledge as "temporal, indeterminate and contingent" and "linked to power through an understanding of the process of inquiry as an event in effecting material change."[54] Third, a way past the fact–value impasse. Pragmatism refuses the choice between a value-free social science and a merely partisan one; for Dewey, and for Du Bois, the duty to know and the duty to repair are one duty, which is why the tradition has been so productive for engaged and participatory scholarship. Fourth, a vocabulary for interdisciplinarity. Rorty's claim that literature and the arts are "inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries" is contestable, but the pragmatist premise beneath it, that all inquiry is conduct answerable to its consequences, is close to the only premise on which the humanities and the social sciences can converse without one of them pretending to be physics.[55] Fifth, for the historian of ideas, a model of genealogical method: Hamner's practice of mapping a few concepts across national and disciplinary spaces and asking "what is at stake in anchoring, for example, consciousness in this way and causality in that way" is transferable to any tradition one is trying to historicize, including one's own discipline.[56]
The criticisms are as important as the uses, and I state them in the tradition's own spirit of self-correction. Pragmatism's anti-foundationalism can harden into a new foundation, and its praise of "community" can quietly assume whose community is meant. Its cheerful meliorism has struck many readers as naive about power and tragedy; Bertrand Russell complained that pragmatism was "too utilitarian in outlook" and "bore the taint of commercialism," and Thelma Lavine judged that the tradition's very thinness left it with "no substantive content" and "offered no normative structures for the problems of men." Hamner presses the sharpest charge, that Peirce and James answered the political questions of their moment "in ways eerily disjunctive to the social complexities and tensions that surround them." She defers "the 'dark side' of pragmatism (the ways it upholds racism, sexism, and classism)" to "a separate and worthy book."[57] Parts of that book have since been written, by Siegfried on gender, by West and others on race, by Pratt and the Indigenous critics of Discovery on land. The student who takes up pragmatism as a method inherits the obligation to keep writing it.
Where, then, to begin? For the founders, Peirce's "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1877–78) are short and indispensable; James's Pragmatism (1907) and "The Will to Believe" (1896) show the tradition's popular face. Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) and The Public and Its Problems (1927) show its social one. For the history, Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club (2001) is the narrative, Hollinger's 1980 essay is the corrective, and Whitehead's William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture (2015) is the best guide to how the story keeps being retold. For the displaced lineages, read Siegfried, West's Evasion, and Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro alongside The Souls of Black Folk. For the social sciences, read Lewis and Smith on the realist–nominalist split and its consequences for symbolic interactionism, and the pragmatist-feminist methodologists on inquiry as engaged practice. And for what the American adjective conceals, read Hamner. When someone in a seminar reduces the whole tradition to "whatever works," hand them Du Bois on Booker T. Washington and Peirce on the drunken fellow who settles a Regent Street idealist's doubts about the external world by punching him in the eye, and let the tradition defend itself.[58]
Peirce gave inquiry its best image, and it is the image with which to leave the tradition. Reasoning, he wrote against Descartes, "should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected."[59] Pragmatism is such a cable. No single fiber (not the maxim, not the theory of truth, not the social self, not the democratic faith) will bear the weight of a dissertation alone. Taken together, and kept honest by the community that tests them, they will bear a great deal.
Disclosures: I revisited several readers and relied on notes from my independent study over the summer on Pragmatism at Syracuse University, along with notes from conversations with my colleague with whom I took the independent study. I also used Grammarly to clean up grammar and spelling.
Lovejoy quoted in Deborah Whitehead, William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 42. ↩︎
Schiller quoted in Whitehead, William James, 43. ↩︎
Bernstein quoted in Whitehead, William James, 2, 26. ↩︎
James quoted in Whitehead, William James, 27; on the date and setting, 26–27. ↩︎
Peirce quoted in Whitehead, William James, 36; on the club's contested existence, 37. ↩︎
Menand quoted in Whitehead, William James, 32; Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vol. 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 5.414 (hereafter CP, cited by volume and paragraph). ↩︎
CP 5.402. ↩︎
Bain quoted in M. Gail Hamner, American Pragmatism: A Religious Genealogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 82; CP 5.398. ↩︎
CP 5.400. ↩︎
CP 5.401. ↩︎
Hamner, American Pragmatism, 145–46. ↩︎
Dewey quoted in Philip W. Jackson, "John Dewey," in A Companion to Pragmatism, ed. John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 59. ↩︎
Hamner, American Pragmatism, 92. ↩︎
CP 5.265. ↩︎
CP 5.407, 5.311. ↩︎
CP 5.317. ↩︎
CP 5.374, 5.376. ↩︎
CP 5.423. ↩︎
James quoted in Richard Rorty, "Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy," in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), §2. ↩︎
Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 65. ↩︎
Hamner, American Pragmatism, 128. ↩︎
James quoted in Hamner, American Pragmatism, 148. ↩︎
Du Bois to Herbert Aptheker, 10 January 1956, quoted in Nancy Muller Milligan, "W.E.B. DuBois' American Pragmatism," Journal of American Culture (offprint consulted; volume, issue, and year to be supplied), 1. ↩︎
Jackson, "John Dewey," 57. ↩︎
Dewey quoted in Jackson, "John Dewey," 59, 60. ↩︎
Dewey quoted in Jackson, "John Dewey," 60. ↩︎
Dewey quoted in Jackson, "John Dewey," 62–63. ↩︎
Dewey quoted in Jackson, "John Dewey," 61. ↩︎
Mead quoted in J. David Lewis and Richard L. Smith, American Sociology and Pragmatism: Mead, Chicago Sociology, and Symbolic Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 24. ↩︎
Lewis and Smith, American Sociology and Pragmatism, 25; on Mead's marginality, 26, 250. ↩︎
Lewis and Smith, American Sociology and Pragmatism, 24–25. ↩︎
Hamner, American Pragmatism, 3. ↩︎
Nick Rumens and Mihaela Kelemen, "American Pragmatism and Feminism: Fresh Opportunities for Sociological Inquiry," Contemporary Pragmatism 7, no. 1 (2010): 136. ↩︎
Sandra B. Rosenthal, "Classical American Pragmatism: The Other Naturalism," Metaphilosophy 27, no. 4 (1996): 405. ↩︎
Du Bois, The Crisis (June 1911), quoted in Milligan, "W.E.B. DuBois' American Pragmatism," 4. ↩︎
CP 1.135 (1899), where Peirce calls "Do not block the way of inquiry" the corollary of the "first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason"; discussed in Hamner, American Pragmatism, 104. ↩︎
Whitehead, William James, 26. ↩︎
Seigfried quoted in Whitehead, William James, 55. ↩︎
Rumens and Kelemen, "American Pragmatism and Feminism," 134. ↩︎
Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (1968), as quoted in Jerome D. Clarke, "Black Praxis: The Trace of Jamesian Pragmatism in DuBoisian Scholar Activism" (student paper, Gettysburg College, 2016), 2. ↩︎
Du Bois, "Philosophy IV Notebook," quoted in Milligan, "W.E.B. DuBois' American Pragmatism," 2. ↩︎
West, American Evasion, 138, 212. ↩︎
West, American Evasion, 5. ↩︎
Hamner, American Pragmatism, 3, 4. ↩︎
Hamner, American Pragmatism, 5, 4, 72. ↩︎
David A. Hollinger, "The Problem of Pragmatism in American History," Journal of American History 67, no. 1 (1980): 91 (on Bruce Kuklick's Rise of American Philosophy), 107. ↩︎
James quoted in Whitehead, William James, 70; Pratt quoted in Whitehead, 60. ↩︎
Whitehead, William James, 68. ↩︎
Hollinger, "The Problem of Pragmatism," 88, 89. ↩︎
Rorty, "Introduction," §1. ↩︎
Rorty, "Introduction," §5. ↩︎
Rorty, "Introduction," §5. ↩︎
Joseph Margolis, "Introduction: Pragmatism, Retrospective, and Prospective," in Shook and Margolis, A Companion to Pragmatism, 4. ↩︎
Rumens and Kelemen, "American Pragmatism and Feminism," 137; on pragmatist-feminist ethnography, 139–43. ↩︎
Rorty, "Introduction," §5. ↩︎
Hamner, American Pragmatism, 8. ↩︎
Hamner, American Pragmatism, 172, 212–1344; Lavine's judgment ("no substantive content") in Thelma Z. Lavine, "American Pragmatism: Transference and Aufhebung," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 24, no. 4 (1988): 482; Russell reported in Jackson, "John Dewey," 62. ↩︎
For the drunken fellow, CP 5.539. ↩︎
CP 5.265. ↩︎
Tags : notes guide philosophy pragmatism
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