Pragmatism is the name given to a worldwide philosophic movement that was most important in the United States in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Two centers of "classic" pragmatism existed in the United States. The one at the University of Chicago was led by John Dewey, who later taught at Columbia University in New York City, and included James H. Tufts, George Herbert Mead, and Addison W. Moore. The other had its nucleus at Harvard University and included Charles S. Peirce, William James, and Josiah Royce. Later in the twentieth century Harvard continued to be an influential stronghold of academic pragmatism, while New York City's intellectual life reflected Dewey's concerns. At the end of the twentieth century an important revival of pragmatism took place in scholarly disciplines outside of
Philosophy.
Pragmatism arose as the most sophisticated attempt to
reconcile science and religion in the wake of the widespread acceptance of Darwinian biology. The early pragmatists argued that the truth of an idea lay primarily in its ability satisfactorily to orient individuals to the world of which they were a part but also in its consistency with other ideas and its aesthetic appeal. Ideas were plans of action and would be deemed true if action in accordance with them "worked" in the long run. The pragmatists rejected what later became known as "
representationalism," the belief that a true idea corresponded to its object. Truth was not a connection something mental had to something outside the mind but instead characterized a way of behaving. For the pragmatists, philosophers should not look for answers to speculative problems by
cogitation in the library; rather, the practices of communities of inquirers should be explored. Accordingly the pragmatists accepted the findings and methods of the sciences and urged that their methods be applied in all areas of study. But they also thought that religious ideas, for example, belief in the existence of God and in a
benign universe, might be justified if they had survival value.
Pragmatism At Harvard
In "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," published in
Popular Science Monthly in 1878, Peirce originally expressed these views in connection with the meaning of the concepts of the physical sciences. James's exposition was vigorously and forcefully popular, especially in his collected essays
Pragmatism (1907). For James the chief virtue of the pragmatic account of truth was that it made philosophy concrete. James's position reflected his early interest in physiology and psychology, and he elaborated his insights in a long argument with his Harvard colleague Royce, who formulated a less-individualistic doctrine called "absolute pragmatism." Counting the emotional benefits of holding a belief to be true as part of the meaning of truth, James defended
heartfelt spiritual creeds, and Peirce, calling his own views "pragmaticism," dissociated himself from James's nontechnical theorizing. James had an international reputation, and his support assisted in the promulgation of his ideas by F. C. Schiller in England, Henri Bergson in France, and Giovanni Papini in Italy.
Pragmatism At Chicago and Columbia
Steeped in the cultural thought of German idealism, Dewey used his version of pragmatism, called "instrumentalism," to attack educational, social, and political problems, as in
The School and Society (1899) and
Liberalism and Social Action (1935). Throughout Dewey's long and prolific career he was involved in controversy and led many liberal intellectual causes. His beliefs about "experimentalism" and the use of the "method of intelligence" in social life became the theoretical
underpinning of the social sciences in the American university that of ten tilted against the
status quo. A crude form of pragmatism became widely known as the
rationale behind reformist politics: the political pragmatist was the liberal who restricted progressive goals to what was obtainable practically, to programs that could succeed.
A second period of pragmatism was under way when Dewey retired from teaching in 1929. In New York City a version of his system was propagated first of all by a younger group of "Columbia naturalists," including Ernest Nagel, John Herman Randall, and Herbert Schneider. For these thinkers intelligence grew out of a "natural" biological realm that yet provided an adequate
locus for a moral and political life valuing humanism, social democracy, and internationalism. The naturalists also included among their allies Morris Cohen of the City College of New York, who sent generations of students to Columbia for graduate study; Dewey's student Sidney Hook, who articulately defended his mentor's ideas and pragmatism's public role from his position at New York University; and Alvin Johnson, director of the New School for Social Research, who presided over an expansion of instrumentalist ideas in sociology and political science.
Later Pragmatisms
At Harvard the second period of pragmatism made Cambridge, Massachusetts, the premier place to study professional philosophy. A student of Royce and James, C. I. Lewis developed an epistemological system called "conceptual pragmatism." In his influential book of 1929,
Mind and the World-Order, Lewis argued that the various frameworks of ideas by means of which people gained knowledge about the world were chosen on the basis of their practical value, but he emphasized the
primacy of the hard sciences in obtaining knowledge. Over the next fifty years Lewis's academic writing was central to the "pragmatic analysts," the most significant group of American philosophers, Nelson Goodman, Willard Quine, and Hilary Putnam, all of whom subsequently taught at Harvard. These scholars and a host of lesser figures focused on logic and the philosophy of science. They intimated that humans lived in a Darwinian universe
bereft of purpose and best explored by physics. At the same time they acknowledged that people selected conceptual structures with communal human purposes in mind and that of ten alternative structures were equally legitimate in accounting for the flux of experience and for attempts to navigate experience. A crucial explanation of these tension-laden concerns was laid out in Quine's celebrated essay, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," published in the
Philosophical Re-view in 1951.
The Revival of Pragmatism
In the last quarter of the twentieth century pragmatic ideas remained alive in the work of the pragmatic analysts but had neither the religious nor social dimension of the more publicly accessible views of James or Dewey. In the discipline of philosophy in the United States classic pragmatism was considered an old-fashioned and
unrefinedphilosophical commitment. Nonetheless at the end of the century a large-scale pragmatic renewal depended on the arguments of the analysts but also resurrected the concerns of classic figures.
These developments began with the extraordinary publication of
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn, who had studied at Harvard and been influenced by Quine. Kuhn's thesis, that succeeding scientific worldviews were not progressive but
incommensurable and thus to some degree relative, was ignored or patronized by many philosophers. Nonetheless his best-selling cross-disciplinary book was widely adopted by social scientists in a variety of disciplines, by departments of literature and the humanities generally, and by historians. It became common for many Kuhn-tinged thinkers to assert that
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had proved beyond doubt that no ideas could be proved true.
In 1979, using the ideas of Quine and Kuhn, Richard Rorty published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which gave some philosophical support to Kuhn's relativistic ideas. But Rorty also linked them to the classic pragmatists, urging that human beings had different "discourses" available to them to attain whatever ends they might have, but no one discourse, including that of natural science, was privileged above the others. All were to be justified by their ability to lead expeditiously to the achievement of goals. Critics argued that such a "linguistic" pragmatism was less robust in its public implications than that of James and Dewey, a charge that Rorty both accepted in his commitment to private concerns and rebutted in writings that promoted the political side of his pragmatism. Rorty had an impact within the discipline of philosophy, but he was more connected to programs in humanities and comparative literature and was most generously read outside of the discipline of philosophy. He in any event had led the way to a revitalized pragmatic movement that regarded the classic thinkers as engaged in debates relevant to the twenty-first–century world.
Bibliography
Kloppenberg, James T. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Puts pragmatism in an international context.
Kuklick, Bruce. A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 2001. Most recent synthesis with a large section on pragmatism.
Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1935. The outstanding philosophical biography.
Stuhr, John J., ed. Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretive Essays. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Thayer, H. S. Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. A standard treatment.
Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1991. An excellent account of classic pragmatism.
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