Pragmatism

corrected Joas/Haddock bibliographiesPragmatism. The most important and controversial philosophical tradition to originate in the United States since transcendentalism, pragmatism remained central to American intellectual life at the twentieth century's end. A cluster of ideas first articulated by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., pragmatism generates debate in fields as diverse as philosophy, feminism, and legal theory.

Peirce, James, and Holmes developed their ideas in the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1870s. Collisions between the world of chance and change disclosed by Darwinian science, on the one hand, and, on the other, traditional philosophical systems, whether premised on religious dogmas or on the Cartesian dualisms of spirits and matter and mind and body, persuaded these thinkers to reject claims to absolute certainty. They chose instead the experimental method and accepted the provisionality of all knowledge. But if their embrace of uncertainty accounted for the renewed interest in their ideas in the late twentieth century, the early pragmatists’ devotion to democratic ideals and their moral earnestness distinguished them from cynics who celebrate the postmodern culture of irony.

Peirce argued that communities of inquiry—outside as well as within the natural sciences—should proceed toward a hypothetical Omega point at which unconstrained investigation would yield truth, which remained for him a regulative ideal. James doubted that such consensus could ever emerge. Much in human experience, he believed, flowing in the stream of consciousness that he explored in his masterpiece The Principles of Psychology (1890), defies scientific explanation or even adequate linguistic expression. Developing Peirce's ideas in ways Peirce himself found unpalatable, James insisted that dimensions of human life, including questions of metaphysics, faith, and morals, elude scientific explanation. In Pragmatism (1907), James argued that in certain circumstances—and only in such circumstances, which he clarified in The Meaning of Truth (1909)—individuals should ask what difference believing a hypothesis would make in their lives. When a question cannot be tested empirically (the existence of God, for example) and the question is alive, momentous, and inescapable for an individual, then the “will to believe” might well replace the normal scientific attitude of open‐minded skepticism. Despite the jibes of critics who accused him of authorizing wishful thinking and valorizing material success, James neither doubted that reality always constrains belief nor adopted a crudely functionalist definition of what it means for a hypothesis to “work.” Instead he sought to open individual lives and cultural debate to unpopular options, whether unfashionably traditional (such as religious belief) or radical (such as anti‐imperialism), that might fruitfully be tested in individual or collective experience.

Dewey and Mead extended these insights into social analysis, Dewey through his wide‐ranging and often misunderstood writings about progressive education and democratic politics, Mead through theories of symbolic interaction and intersubjectivity that powerfully shaped twentieth‐century sociology from the Chicago School to the seminal German theorists Jürgen Habermas and Hans Joas.

The thought of the early pragmatists is incomprehensible outside the context of American Progressivism. Among reformist currents that inspired them and in which they participated were the social experiments of settlement‐house leaders such as Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, the feminism of Jessie Taft and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch and W.D.P. Bliss, the socially engaged economics of Richard T. Ely and John Commons, the political ideas of Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, the cultural radicalism of such founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as W.E.B. Du Bois and William English Walling, and the jurisprudence of Holmes and Louis Brandeis.

Pragmatism's alliance with progressivism did not survive World War I, however. Stinging critiques by writers such as Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Arthur Lovejoy, and Reinhold Niebuhr, who from diverse perspectives accused pragmatists of abandoning their ethical and political ideals to become accomplices of power, corresponded with the broader interwar cultural transformations. To critics, early pragmatists’ ideal of individuals in a democratically constituted community of inquiry deliberating and testing hypotheses seemed either too fragile in the face of power, too constraining of personal liberty, or too sunny‐minded in the face of evil. In Dewey's writings and teaching, in the work of legal realists such as Felix Frankfurter and Jerome Frank, and in some of the more experimental corners of the New Deal Era, however, pragmatism survived.

Pragmatism faced renewed opposition after World War II as the natural sciences—and the certainty they promised—emerged as models for scholarship and politics. The behaviorism that dominated psychology, sociology, and politics preserved Dewey's enthusiasm for experimentation but lost his concern with the qualitative dimensions of experience and inquiry in human sciences. The rise of linguistic analysis displaced pragmatism in American philosophy. James and Dewey had worried that Bertrand Russell would guide philosophers toward a new scholasticism of propositional logic and, indeed Russell's and Rudolf Carnap's American disciples, leaders of a professionalizing discipline aspiring to scientific status and entranced by the intricacies of logical positivism, dismissed as meaningless all questions of metaphysics, ethics, and politics. Not surprisingly, they had no patience with the early pragmatists. Popularizers of pragmatism such as Will Durant simplified the ideas of the founders for mass consumption, but this merely reinforced the tendency of critics and vulgarizers alike to identify pragmatism with the can‐do attitude and assumptions of self‐satisfied middle‐class Americans.

The years after the 1960s, however, saw a multifaceted and rapidly proliferating resurgence of pragmatism. Inspired by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to see the natural sciences as human creations subject to paradigm shifts, and by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz to see the social sciences as inevitably value‐laden, many analysts of American culture returned to the early pragmatists for ammunition. In the process they resurrected some ideas and transformed others. Philosophers such as Richard Rorty and various cultural and literary critics invoke pragmatism as the American source for their own versions of antifoundationalism. By contrast, philosophers and legal theorists such as Hilary Putnam, Richard J. Bernstein, Cornel West, and Joan Williams, and historians such as Thomas Haskell, David Hollinger, and Robert Westbrook, tried to recover and extend the earlier pragmatists’ ethical and political commitments. If, as James and Dewey argued, neither tradition nor science can provide universal, unchanging truths, a democratic culture should seek provisional agreements—and negotiate inevitable differences—through open, uncoerced discussions among autonomous participants whose status is presumed equal rather than fixed by their race, gender, or social class. For insights into that project and how it should proceed, pragmatism remained a vital source.
See also Evolution, Theory of; Gilded Age; Postmodernism; Progressive Era; Religion; Social Science.

Bibliography

John E. Smith , Purpose and Thought: The Meaning of Pragmatism, 1978.
Horace Standish Thayer , Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism, 1981.
James T. Kloppenberg , Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920, 1986.
Hans Joas , Pragmatism and Social Theory, 1993.
Charlene Haddock Siegfried , Pragmatism and Feminism, 1996.
James T. Kloppenberg , Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?, in The Revival of Pragmatism, ed. Morris Dickstein, 1998, pp. 83–127.

James T. Kloppenberg