Pragmatism

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PRAGMATISM

"Pragmatism" was the most influential philosophy in America in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Viewed against the widely diversified intellectual currents that have characterized American life, pragmatism stands out as an energetically evolved philosophical movement. As a movement it is best understood as, in part, a critical rejection of much of traditional academic philosophy and, in part, a concern to establish certain positive aims. It is in these respects, rather than because of any one idea or exclusive doctrine, that pragmatism has been the most distinctive and the major contribution of America to the world of philosophy. Among the Continental thinkers it has influenced and with whose philosophy it has been in harmony are Georg Simmel, Wilhelm Ostwald, Edmund Husserl, Hans Vaihinger, Richard Müiller-Freienfels, Hans Hahn, Giovanni Papini (leader of the Pragmatist Club in Florence), Giovanni Vailati, Henri Bergson, and Édouard Le Roy.

Background

The origins of pragmatism are clear in outline, if not in detail. The familiar capsule description is as follows: Pragmatism is a method of philosophizing—often said to be a theory of meaning—first developed by Charles Sanders Peirce in the 1870s; revived and reformulated in 1898 by William James, primarily as a theory of truth; further developed, expanded, and disseminated by John Dewey and Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller.

This glossing of the facts is useful as a summary or for directing us where to look if we want to find out more about pragmatism. But it can be misleading. A reexamination or rewriting of the history is not to be embarked upon here; but the following cautionary points deserve mention. The specific formative conditions of the early evolution of pragmatism are not entirely clear for several reasons. The historical occasion of the birth of pragmatism is complicated because it was to some extent the product of cooperative deliberation and mutual influences within the "Metaphysical Club," founded by Peirce, James, and others in the 1870s in Cambridge. This may be one of the very few cases in which a philosophy club produced something notable philosophically (compare John Locke's account of the "club" in the 1670s that stimulated the writing of his great Essay ). But the paper (now lost) that Peirce drew up as a memento lest the club dissolve without leaving behind anything substantial, the paper in which pragmatism was first expressed, was not the free creation of one mind, even though the major credit surely goes to Peirce. Years later, undertaking to write on pragmatism, Peirce queried James: "Who originated the term pragmatism, I or you? Where did it first appear in print? What do you understand by it?" And James replied with the reminder: "You invented 'pragmatism' for which I gave you full credit in a lecture entitled 'Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results.'"

In addition to some uncertainty as to the facts in the evolution of pragmatism, there are—as we shall see—several problems of interpretation. Peirce and James often gave very different accounts of what they understood by "pragmatism." Usually this is explained by holding James responsible for distorting or even misunderstanding Peirce's ideas. That there were differences between Peirce and James on this score is clear. Peirce, despairing of what James (and his followers) were making of the idea, rebaptized his own view as "pragmaticism," a word ugly enough, he commented, to keep it safe from kidnapers. Historians usually side with Peirce, tending to discredit James's overzealous pronouncements upon pragmatism and applications of it to issues of the moral value and truth of religious belief. But with equal justice it can be maintained that James was developing a substantially different approach to a different type of philosophical problem, related in some ways to Peirce's thought, but mostly superficially; only his habitual overgenerosity led him to call what he was doing "pragmatism" and to cite Peirce as the "inventor."

There is, however, a more serious and persistent problem of interpretation entrenched in the history of pragmatism. This is the problem of determining with some precision what "pragmatism" means or stands for as a philosophical doctrine. As already suggested, pragmatism, by virtue of being an evolving philosophical movement, is to be viewed as a group of associated theoretical ideas and attitudes developed over a period of time and exhibiting—under the differing influences of Peirce, James, and Dewey—rather significant shifts in direction and in formulation. We have the advantage of historical perspective and can make use of it to survey and select distinctive themes and phases in the formation of pragmatism, but a single definitive statement of a single thesis is not to be hoped for.

In the heyday of pragmatism its rapidly changing character proved to be a source of embarrassment and confusion to pragmatists and critics alike. Arthur O. Lovejoy, in a welcome effort at clarification, in 1908 distinguished thirteen possible forms of pragmatism. And Schiller, in an almost intoxicating pluralistic spirit, commented that there were as many pragmatisms as there were pragmatists (at the time a considerable company). Additional confusion over pragmatism was caused by the tendency of its spokesmen to find the philosophical past well populated with pragmatists. Thus Socrates, Protagoras, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Benedict de Spinoza, Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, J. S. Mill, and an assorted variety of scientists were included in the fold.

These perplexities, once hotly debated in the journals, are now only of historical interest. They need not concern us in surveying and assessing what are undoubtedly the leading ideas of pragmatism. It suffices to note the irony in the fact that while pragmatism was supposed to have made its appearance in the paper by Peirce titled "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878), pragmatists continued to have so much trouble in doing so.

Charles Sanders Peirce

What has come to be known as Peirce's pragmatism grew out of his study of the phenomenology of human thought and the uses of language. For Peirce, the investigation of thought and language—and, therefore, the way into specific studies of all kinds of claims, assertions, beliefs, and ideas—depended upon the understanding of "signs." One of Peirce's lasting ideals, resolutely pursued but never completely achieved, was to work out a general theory of signs—that is, a classification and analysis of the types of signs and sign relations and significations that, in the broadest sense, make communication possible. A sign is anything that stands for something else. While this ancient way of putting it admits of a trivial construction (signs are signs), for Peirce, the main thing was that signs are socially standardized ways in which something (a thought, word, gesture, object) refers us (a community) to something else (the interpretant—the significant effect or translation of the sign, being itself another sign). Thus, signs presuppose minds in communication with other minds, which in turn presupposes a community (of interpreters) and a system of communication.

pragmatic method

Put roughly, Peirce's pragmatism is a rule of procedure for promoting linguistic and conceptual clarity—successful communication—when men are faced with intellectual problems. Because the emphasis is upon method, Peirce often remarked that pragmatism is not a philosophy, a metaphysic, or a theory of truth; it is not a solution or answer to anything but a technique to help us find solutions to problems of a philosophical or scientific nature.

One of Peirce's best-known statements of the technique was in "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (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 objects." In a somewhat clearer account he said that "in order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception" (Collected Papers, Vol. V, paragraph 9).

While Peirce often spoke of pragmatism as a method of clarifying the meaning variously of words, ideas, concepts (sometimes of objects), we can take his intended purpose to be as follows:

Pragmatism is a method of clarifying and determining the meaning of signs. We must note the comprehensive status Peirce gives to signs in this connection, for example: "All thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language." The pragmatic method, however, does not apply to all the various kinds of signs and modes and purposes of communication. Peirce considered pragmatism "a method of ascertaining the meaning of hard words and abstract concepts" or, again, "a method of ascertaining the meanings, not of all ideas, but … 'intellectual concepts,' that is to say, of those upon the structure of which, arguments concerning objective fact may hinge."
The aim of the method is to facilitate communication, and in particular cases, the degree to which this is accomplished determines the relevance and justification of the method. This aim takes two main forms illustrated in Peirce's writings. The first is of a critical nature: Where disputes or philosophical problems seem to have no discoverable or agreed-upon solution, pragmatism advises that words are being used in different ways or without definite meaning at all. For example, says Peirce, pragmatism will "show that almost every proposition of ontological metaphysics is either meaningless … or else … absurd." And it is in this critical capacity that Peirce remarked: "Pragmatism solves no real problem. It only shows that supposed problems are not real problems."

But the second role the method performs is much less negative: Where signs (that is, ideas, concepts, language) are unclear, the method supplies a procedure for reconstructing or explicating meanings. Here the method is directed to translating (or systematically replacing) unclear concepts with clearer ones. It is in this spirit that Peirce offered his explications of the concepts of "hardness," "weight," "force," "reality." His procedure consisted in translating and explicating a sign (a term, such as hard, or sentences of signs, such as "x is hard") by providing a conditional statement of a given situation (or class of situations) in which a definite operation will produce a definite result. Thus, to say of some object O that it is "hard" is to mean that "if in certain situations the operation of scratch-testing is performed on O, then the general result is: O will not be scratched by most substances." The sign (or concept) "hard" in statements asserting that some object is hard is replaceable and clarified pragmatically with a conditional statement of the sort just given. Peirce refers to this method of conditional explication of signs as a "prescription" or "precept." The conditionals are recipes informing us what we must do if we wish to find out the kind of conditions determining the meaningful use of a sign.

meaning

For Peirce, two points are of considerable importance in the pragmatic procedure for determining meaning, (a ) Where one cannot provide any conditional translation for a sign, its (pragmatic) meaning is empty. This is what Peirce intended by such characteristic statements as that our conception of an object is our conception of its "practical effects" or "sensible effects." He did not mean (as James sometimes did) that the meaning of a concept is the practical effect it has in particular cases when you use it. All Peirce argued was that a concept must have some conceivable consequences, or "practical bearings," and that these must be specifiable in the manner just discussed if the concept is to play a significant role in communication, (b ) Peirce's pragmatism thus is offered as a schema for getting at the meaning, or empirical significance, of language. As a schema it is not a theory of meaning in the sense of some general definition of meaning; it is a theoretical device for getting at the empirically significant content of concepts by determining the roles they play in classes of empirically verifiable statements. This procedure, or schema, clearly foreshadowed the later programs of operationalism and the verifiability theory of meaning.

Despite some serious difficulties that jeopardize portions of Peirce's method, the general aspects of his approach appear to be sound canons of scientific practice. Peirce's recondite statements of pragmatism have created considerable confusion. But Peirce seemed less concerned with the problem of providing an accurate and complete statement of the "maxim" of pragmatism than with its use and justification. This he attempted to show in much of his later philosophical inquiries of a scientific and metaphysical sort.

Peirce's schema, or prescriptive method, for "determining the meaning of intellectual concepts" has several sources in addition to his familiarity with scientific technique. Suggestions of it are to be found in Berkeley and in Kant. Peirce's view that meanings take a general form expressed in schema or formulas that prescribe kinds of operations and results and conceivable consequences and rules of action was directly linked to Kant. Peirce says he was led to the method of pragmatism by reflecting on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and on the Kantian use of pragmatisch for empirical, or experimentally conditioned, laws, "based on and applying to experience."

inquiry and truth

It should be noted, finally, that Peirce's pragmatism is part of a more general account of "inquiry," aspects of which he elaborated with some care and most of which was taken up into Dewey's extensive construction of a theory of inquiry. Peirce described the function of thought as a form of behavior initiated by the irritation of doubt and proceeding to some resolution in a state of belief. Belief is a condition of organic stability and intellectual satisfaction, but these latter do not determine the truth of beliefs. Peirce outlined a scientific and pragmatic method of clarifying and justifying belief. It was this aspect of Peirce's analysis of inquiry and belief that suggested a pragmatic theory of truth. On this matter he was unclear and wavering. Sometimes truth and pragmatic meaning overlapped or coalesced in his discussions of them. But Peirce also argued that truth theory and pragmatism are entirely separate considerations. Generally, the idea of truth, for Peirce, is drawn from Kant and is to be understood as a regulative idea, one that functions solely to order, integrate, and promote inquiry. Taken as a "correspondence" or "coherence" theory—or criticized from the point of view of such theories—Peirce's account of truth looks strange, cumbersome, and naive.

William James

It was James who launched pragmatism as a new philosophy in a lecture "Philosophical Conceptions" in 1898; it was under his leadership that pragmatism came to be famous; and it was primarily his exposition that was received and read by the world at large.

Although Peirce and James were lifelong friends and exerted much intellectual influence upon each other, they differed in ways that had important effects upon their respective versions of pragmatism. Peirce was a realist (calling himself a scholastic realist); James was far more of a nominalist. Where Peirce sought meaning in general concepts and formulas of action, James sought meaning in experienced facts and plans of action. James looked to the concrete, immediate, practical level of experience as the testing ground of our intellectual efforts; for Peirce, the immediate sensory experience is all but destitute of "intellectual purport." Furthermore, while Peirce's pragmatism took a logical and scientific character, James, despite being an eminent man of science, was first and foremost a moralist in his pragmatism.

value

Moral interests and moral language appear in almost every important passage of James's writing on pragmatism. In Pragmatism James made his moral conception of philosophy unmistakably evident in saying that "the whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one." The phrase "what definite difference … at definite instants of our life" is by and large James's way of critically judging the meaning and truth of ideas. For James, meaning and truth are included in a more fundamental category of value; to determine the meaning or truth of ideas one must evaluate their "practical consequences," "usefulness," "workability." In several famous pronouncements, James spoke of truth as what is good or expedient in our beliefs. In a phrase that permanently shocked some of his readers, James described the meaning and truth of ideas as their "cash value."

Generally, for James, the function of thought is that of assisting us to achieve and sustain "satisfactory relations with our surroundings." The value of ideas, beliefs, and conceptual dealings is to be determined accordingly, on each of numerous occasions, by their effectiveness and efficiency as the means of carrying us propitiously "from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor."

James was thus primarily concerned with issues of belief and conceptual renditions of experience in their role of enabling men to deal with environments and to enrich the fare of daily experience. It is the level of life experience that interested James. Hence, his own statements of pragmatism resemble those of Peirce but emphasize the importance of immediate experience and practical consequences and clues to action. For James, our thoughts of an object pragmatically considered lead us to "what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object." If we compare this statement from Pragmatism with those cited earlier from Peirce, it is not difficult to see that in James's pragmatism the emphasis is upon the way individuals interpret environing conditions for purposes of successful action. The passage also reflects how James's view differed from Peirce's Kantian conception; James explained "pragmatism" as coming from the Greek πράγμα, meaning "practice," "action." Indeed, so fundamental are action, exploration, and life experience in James's philosophy that some of his critics have taken great pains to demonstrate the value of inaction and the general uselessness of philosophy. In this endeavor, it may be said, they have been on the whole successful.

belief

It was James's conception of truth that became a cause célèbre for pragmatism and its critics, until eventually James, tiring of the matter, turned his attention to other philosophical pursuits, leaving to Dewey the defense and development of pragmatism. Aside from truth, the other major critical issue in pragmatism was James's argument for the justification of moral and religious belief. James's interest in the meaning and function of belief was that of a skilled and perceptive psychologist and moralist. His general view was this: When, for a given person P, a belief B answers or satisfies a compelling need (of P to see or interpret the world in a certain way), the "vital good" supplied by B in the life of P (the difference it makes as a beneficial causal condition in the psychological and physiological behavior of P ) justifies B. It must be noted that James argued for this justification procedure only when (a ) the choice of B or not-B is, for a given individual at a given time, "live," "forced," and "momentous"; (b ) the evidence for or against B is equal, or admits of no rational adjudication of one over the other; (c ) the effect or consequences of B are a "vital benefit." These three qualifications work against ascribing to James some popular defense or universal apologia for religious belief. He thought he was correct in pointing to a psychological and moral right to belief analogous to the justification of postulates or posits (in Kantian and Fichtean transcendental philosophizing) or of certain theoretical hypotheses in science.

Peirce and Dewey, among others, were highly critical of this defense of the will to believe. James the psychologist and literary artist brilliantly described the working consequences of types of religious belief for characteristic types of persons. But James the philosopher tended to confuse a descriptive analysis of how belief functions and why men believe with questions of the evaluation or verification of specific cases of belief. (Thus, for example, the fact that B answers a need of P is not of itself evidence that the content of belief B is warranted or that P has correctly understood his "need.")

However, it was this side of James that was enthusiastically received as the moral core of his pragmatism by Schiller in England and Giovanni Papini in Italy. Here also James's views have affinities with those of Bergson, Vaihinger, and Simmel. James seemed to be a democratic, energetic, and lovable Johann Gottlieb Fichte, an artist and scientist exhorting men to trust their beliefs and, above all, to leave the classroom and cloister and start living and acting in the world.

John Dewey

In the article "The Development of American Pragmatism," Dewey described Peirce's views as stemming from an "experimental, not a priori, explanation of Kant" and James's pragmatism as inspired by British empiricism. But he also noted this difference: "Peirce wrote as a logician and James as a humanist." There was, in fact, a cross-fertilization of these strains; but the characterization is apt and traceable enough in the history of pragmatism and in Dewey, too, to be of expository aid. Dewey began to appreciate James while still under the influence of Hegelian and Kantian idealism; later he recognized the importance of Peirce, whose insights and ideas were in many respects anticipations of those Dewey had started to work out on his own. The Hegelian synthesis of the logical and humanistic sides of pragmatism was achieved by the disenchanted Hegelian Dewey.

instrumentalism

Through Dewey's patient, critical, and indefatigable efforts, pragmatism was carefully and thoroughly reformulated into what Dewey called Instrumentalism, "a theory of the general forms of conception and reasoning." Instrumentalism was a single philosophical theory within which the two evolving aspects of pragmatism found coherent expression. Instrumentalism was both theory of logic and a guiding principle of ethical analysis and criticism. For Dewey, this theory bridged the most persistent and noxious of "dualisms" in modern thought—the separation of science and values, knowledge and morals.

Instrumentalism was Dewey's theory of the conditions under which reasoning occurs and of the forms, or controlling operations, that are characteristic of thought in establishing future consequences. In the paper cited above, Dewey wrote:

Instrumentalism is an attempt to constitute a precise logical theory of concepts, of judgments and inferences in their various forms, by considering primarily how thought functions in the experimental determinations of future consequences … it attempts to establish universally recognized distinctions and rules of logic by deriving them from the reconstructive or mediative function ascribed to reason. It aims to constitute a theory of the general forms of conception and reasoning.

A suggestive and vital feature of this theory for Dewey was that while the subject matters of scientific inquiry and moral and social experience differ, the method and forms of thought functioning "in the experimental determinations of future consequences" do not differ in kind. The method of thought and the forms of reflective behavior exhibit a common functional pattern whenever problematic situations become resolved through inquiry yielding "warranted assertion."

inquiry and truth

"Warranted assertion" is the term for Dewey's version of truth. Inquiry is initiated in conditions of doubt; it terminates in the establishment of conditions in which doubt is no longer needed or felt. It is this settling of conditions of doubt, a settlement produced and warranted by inquiry, which distinguishes the warranted assertion. Whereas Dewey once defined "truth" as the "working" or "satisfactory" or "verified" idea or hypothesis, he was led, later—partly as a result of several critical controversies over truth with Bertrand Russell during the 1930s and 1940s—to restate his view of truth as warranted assertion.

In his Logic Dewey gave his general definition of inquiry as "the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole." The theory of inquiry was developed over many years and in many writings; into it went the products of Dewey's reflections on the nature of thought, his contributions to psychology and education, the influence of the biological and functional aspects of James's Principles of Psychology, and the influence of Peirce on the nature of scientific inquiry. In his analysis of the biological and cultural conditions of inquiry and in his account of intelligence as a function of these interacting conditions in a particular situation with respect to a problem and its outcome, Dewey was also guided by some of the basic ideas in the philosophical social psychology of G. H. Mead, once Dewey's colleague at Michigan and Chicago and one of his closest friends. The definitive statement of the theory is in Dewey's Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938).

For Dewey, the theory of inquiry is a generalized description of the organic, cultural, and formal conditions of intelligent action. Such action is provoked by problems of diverse kinds—political, ethical, scientific, and aesthetic. But irrespective of the specific content of human problems or the nature of problem situations, inquiry is a reflective evaluation of existing conditions—of shortcomings and possibilities—with respect to operations intended to actualize certain potentialities of the situation so as to resolve what was doubtful. The purpose of inquiry is to create goods, satisfactions, solutions, and integration in what was initially a wanting, discordant, troubled, and problematic situation. In this respect all intelligence is evaluative, and no separation of moral, scientific, practical, or theoretical experience is to be made. So commanding an achievement was Dewey's last-mentioned work that "pragmatism" is often identified with the position he expounded there as a naturalistic logic for evaluating and reconstructing human experience.

More Recent Tendencies

A somewhat different articulation of pragmatism, deriving less from James and Dewey than from Peirce, was set forth by C. I. Lewis in the 1920s as "conceptualistic pragmatism." Lewis emphasized the role of mind in supplying the a priori principles and categories by which we proceed to organize and interpret sense experience. But he also stressed the plurality of categories and conceptual schemes by which experience can be interpreted and the evolutionary character of our systems. Because a priori principles impose no necessary order on the world or upon sense experience (determining only our ways of organizing experience), Lewis argued for a "pragmatic a priori." Decisions to accept or reject conceptual principles, indeed the very function of those principles, rest upon socially shared needs and purposes and upon our interest in increased understanding and control over experience. According to Lewis (in Mind and the World Order ), "The interpretation of experience must always be in terms of categories … and concepts which the mind itself determines. There may be alternative conceptual systems giving rise to alternative descriptions of experience, which are equally objective and equally valid.… When this is so, choice will be determined, consciously or unconsciously, on pragmatic grounds."

Lewis's pragmatism resulted in a theory of conceptual and empirical meaning and in an analysis of empirical judgments as probable and evaluative modes of acting upon passing and future experience.

In more recent literature, under the influence of Dewey and Lewis as well as Rudolf Carnap, Charles Morris, Ernest Nagel, Willard Van Orman Quine, and others, "pragmatism" connotes one broad philosophical attitude toward our conceptualization of experience: Theorizing over experience is, as a whole and in detail, fundamentally motivated and justified by conditions of efficacy and utility in serving our various aims and needs. The ways in which experience is apprehended, systematized, and anticipated may be many. Here pragmatism counsels tolerance and pluralism. But, aside from aesthetic and intrinsic interests, all theorizing is subject to the critical objective of maximum usefulness in serving our needs: Our critical decisions, in general, will be pragmatic, granted that in particular cases decisions over what is most useful or needed in our rational endeavors are relative to some given point of view and purposes.

An expression of this attitude that is of current interest was advanced by Peirce, James, and Dewey, as well as by F. P. Ramsey, the brilliant English philosopher influenced by Peirce and James. This is an interpretation of the laws and theories of science as "leading principles," or instrumental procedures, for inferring stated conditions from others. Construed as leading principles, theories function as guides for logical inference, indicating how certain formulations are to be derived from other formulations of events, rather than as descriptively true statements of reality serving as premises from which conclusions are deduced. Pragmatically, theories are inference policies, neither true nor false (except pragmatically) but nonetheless critically assessable as to their utility and clarity and the fruitfulness of the consequences that result from adopting them.

While there continues to be an interest in the philosophies of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Schiller, pragmatism as a movement, in the form outlined in these pages, cannot be said to be alive today. But pragmatism has succeeded in its critical reaction to the nineteenth-century philosophical background from which it emerged; it has helped shape the modern conception of philosophy as a way of investigating problems and clarifying communication rather than as a fixed system of ultimate answers and great truths. And in this alteration of the philosophical scene, some of the positive suggestions of pragmatism have been disseminated into current intellectual life as practices freely adopted and taken for granted to an extent that no longer calls for special notice.

The measure of success pragmatism has achieved in encouraging more successful philosophizing in our time is, by its own standards, its chief justification. To have disappeared as a special thesis by becoming infused in the normal and habitual practices of intelligent inquiry and conduct is surely the pragmatic value of pragmatism.

See also Pragmatics; Pragmatist Epistemology.

Bibliography

general works on pragmatism

Ayer, A. J. The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper, 1968.

Dewey, John. "The Development of American Pragmatism." In his Philosophy and Civilization. New York: Minton Balch, 1931. Ch. 2.

Murphy, J. P. Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.

Quine, W. V. O. "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" In his From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951.

Rorty, Richard. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Rorty, Richard. "A Pragmatist View of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy." Utopia y Praxis Latinoamericana 7 (2002): 29–40.

Scheffler, I. Four Pragmatists: A Critical Introduction to Peirce, James, Mead, and Dewey. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.

Schneider, H. W. History of American Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1946. Chs. 39–41.

Thayer, H. S. Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968.

Thayer, H. S. "Pragmatism." In A Critical History of Western Philosophy, edited by D. J. O'Connor, 437–462. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964.

Wiener, Philip P. Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949.

works by peirce

Collected Papers. 8 vols, edited by C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A. W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958. Vols. V and VIII especially.

Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings, edited by P. P. Weiner. New York: Dover, 1966.

works on peirce

Buchler, Justus. Charles Peirce's Empiricism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939.

Gallie, W. B. Peirce and Pragmatism. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1952.

Murphey, Murray G. The Development of Peirce's Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961.

Rosenberg, Jay F. "How not to Misunderstand Peirce—A Pragmatist's Account of Truth." In What Is Truth?, edited by Richard Schantz. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002.

works by james

"Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results." University of California Chronicle (1898). Reprinted in his Collected Essays and Reviews, 406–437. New York: Longman, 1920.

Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.

The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.