Pragmatism in America

Pragmatism in America

Q: Whether pragmatism helped shape a new way of thinking in post civil war America?

William James's book Pragmatism ([1907]1977) gathered together lectures he had been giving on the subject since 1898 and launched a much broader interest in pragmatism and also controversy concerning what the philosophy means. Most early critics took James as the representative of pragmatism, yet Peirce claimed that James misunderstood his definition in holding the meaning of a concept to be the actual conduct it produces rather than the conceivable conduct (Peirce, 2005). Early European critics such as Georg Simmel, Émile Durkheim, and Max Horkheimer took pragmatism to be an example of an American mentality that reduced truth to mere expediency, to what James unfortunately once expressed as “the cash value of an act.” There has also been a tendency to confuse the philosophy with the everyday meaning of the word pragmatic as expedient, yet Peirce, citing Kant, was careful to distinguish pragmatic from practical (James, 2007).

The earliest roots of pragmatism are to be found in the remarkable series of papers from around 1868, published when Peirce was 29 years old. In “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” and its four denials of Cartesianism, he destroyed the Cartesian foundations of modern philosophy. Against Descartes's attempt to base science on the indubitable foundations of immediate knowledge, Peirce argued that we have no powers of introspection or of intuition, using these terms in their technical logical sense as meaning direct, unmediated, dyadic knowledge. Cognitions are instead determined by previous cognitions, and all cognitions are inferences or mediate signs that, in turn, address interpreting signs (Dewey, 2006). The possibility of scientific truth does not derive from indubitable foundations but by the self-correcting process of interpretation. Peirce, who rejected foundationalism, proposed a regulative ideal of an unlimited community of ...