Pragmatism: An old name for some new ways of thinking?

Journal of American History

Volumn 83, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 100-137

  Kloppenberg, James T ^a  

^a BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0002739646     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2945476     Document Type: Article

References (230)

1. William James to Henry James, May 4, 1907, in The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (2 vols., New York, 1920), II, 279;
2. William James to Theodore Flournoy, Jan. 2, 1907, in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James: As Revealed in Unpublished Correspondence and Notes, Together with His Published Writings (2 vols., Boston, 1935), II, 452-53.
3. James traced pragmatism to its ancient roots in William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907; Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 30-31.
4. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking Ibid., 3.
5. David A. Hollinger, "The Problem of Pragmatism in American History," Journal of American History, 67 (June 1980), 88, 107.
6. Five years later Hollinger cheerfully admitted that his obituary had been premature. See David A. Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Bloomington, 1985), 23, 25, 43.
7. A splendid survey is Richard J. Bernstein, "The Resurgence of Pragmatism," Social Research, 59 (Winter 1992), 813-40.
8. In this essay I will concentrate on William James and John Dewey instead of Charles Sanders Peirce for two reasons. First, Peirce explained in 1904 that he "invented" pragmatism "to express a certain maxim of logic . . . for the analysis of concepts" rather than "sensation" and grounded it on "an elaborate study of the nature of signs." For the precise reason why Peirce's ideas have influenced analytic philosophers and semioticians, his work is less pertinent here. See H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism (Indianapolis, 1981), 493-94.
9. Second, discussing the recent torrent of work on Peirce is beyond the scope of this essay. For a fine introduction, see James Hoopes, ed., Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce (Chapel Hill, 1991);
10. on Peirce's tortured life see Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Bloomington, 1993);
11. on his philosophy of science, see C. F. Delaney, Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce (Notre Dame, 1993).
12. On James's concept of immediate experience, see James M. Edie, William James and Phenomenology (Bloomington, 1987);
13. more comprehensive are Perry, Thought and Character of William James;
14. Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven, 1986).
15. On Dewey's life and thought, see Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, 1991);
16. on qualitative issues in Dewey's philosophy, see James Gouinlock, John Dewey's Philosophy of Value (New York, 1972).
17. A compilation of these criticisms is in John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago, 1994).
18. James Hoopes, Robert Westbrook, and I are unpersuaded by Diggins's interpretation of pragmatism. For our explanations and Diggins's response, see James Hoopes, "Peirce's Community of Signs: The Path Untaken in American Social Thought," Intellectual History Newsletter, 17 (1995), 3-6;
19. James T. Kloppenberg, "The Authority of Evidence and the Boundaries of Interpretation," 17 (1995), 3-6;
20. James T. Kloppenberg, "The Authority of Evidence and the Boundaries of Interpretation," ibid., 7-15;
21. Roben Westbrook, "The Authority of Pragmatism," "The Authority of Evidence and the Boundaries of Interpretation," ibid., 16-24;
22. John Patrick Diggins, "Pragmatism and the Historians," "The Authority of Evidence and the Boundaries of Interpretation," ibid., 25-30.
23. On critics who valued the capacities of creative individuals above pragmatists' concerns with communities of discourse and social justice, see Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill, 1990).
24. On Walter Lippmann and Mortimer Adler, see Edward A. Purcell Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, Ky., 1973).
25. On Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston, 1973).
26. James, Pragmatism, 111-12.
27. William James, The Meaning of Truth (1909; Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 117, 106, 126-28.
28. James, Pragmatism, 102-3.
29. John Dewey, Experience and Nature, in John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925-1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (17 vols., Carbondale, 1981-1990), I, 152;
30. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, The Later Works, 1925-1953, ibid., II, 330-31.
31. Dewey, Experience and Nature, appendix 2 (1951), 372.
32. On the triumph of scientism in American social science, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 390-470.
33. On the relation between scientism and the transformation of philosphy, see Daniel J. Wilson, Science, Community, and the Transformation of American Philosophy, 1860-1930 (Chicago, 1990);
34. Laurence C. Smith, Behaviorism and Logical Positivism: A Reassessment of the Alliance (Stanford, 1986).
35. For Dewey's judgment of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, see John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic, in John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899-1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (15 vols., Carbondale, 1976-1983), X, 357-58.
36. William James to Bertrand Russell, Oct. 4, 1908, in James, Meaning of Truth, 299-300.
37. Russell's jibe appeard in Bertrand Russell, "Dewey's New Logic," in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (1939; New York, 1951), 135-56.
38. On this volume, see Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 496-500.
39. George Cotkin, "Middle-Ground Pragmatists: The Popularization of Philosophy in American Culture," Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (April 1994), 283-302.
40. On Will Durant, see Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill, 1992).
41. See Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York, 1985);
42. Daniel F. Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and John Dewey: An American Odyssey (Albany, 1993).
43. Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism without Method," in Richard Rorty, Philosophical Papers, vol. I: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (New York, 1991), 64.
44. On the shift of American philosophy departments away from pragmatism and toward analytic philosophy and logical positivism, see Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (New York, 1981), 103-26;
45. Bernstein, "Resurgence of Pragmatism," 815-17;
46. a fine overview, David Depew, "Philosophy," in Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley Kutler (4 vols., New York, 1996), IV, 1635-63.
47. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962);
48. Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science, trans. Alexander T. Levine (Chicago, 1993).
49. On the uses of social science in public policy, see'Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley, 1995).
50. See Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (New York, 1976);
51. Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy, eds., Understanding and Social Inquiry (Notre Dame, 1977);
52. Quentin Skinner, ed., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge, Eng., 1985).
53. On these changes in philosophy and political theory, see John Rajchman and Cornel West, eds., Post-Analytic Philosophy (New York, 1985);
54. David Held, ed., Political Theory Today (Stanford, 1991).
55. Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago, 1967).
56. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979).
57. See Alan Malachowski, ed., Reading Rorty: Critical Responses to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Cambridge, Mass., 1990);
58. Herman J. Saatkamp, ed., Rorty and Pragmatism (Nashville, 1995).
59. Ian Hacking, "Two Kinds of 'New Historicism' for Philosophers," in History and . . . : Histories within the Human Sciences, ed. Ralph Cohen and Michael S. Roth (Charlottesville, 1995), 296-318.
60. The very useful words "historicism" and "historicist" continue to baffle some historians, probably due to their almost opposite meanings in the work of the philosopher of science Karl Popper and in contemporary critical discourse. Popper used "historicism" to designate (and denigrate) any theory (such as Marxism) that purports to predict the future course of human events according to ostensibly scientific laws. More recent commentators understand historicism as "the theory that social and cultural phenomena are historically determined and that each period in history has its own values that are not directly applicable to other epochs. In philosophy that implies that philosophical issues find their place, importance, and definition in a specific cultural milieu. That is certainly Rorty's opinion." Ian Hacking, " in History and . . . : Histories within the Human Sciences, Ibid., 298.
61. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 392;
62. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980 (Minneapolis, 1982), xl, xliii.
63. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xviii, 160, 161.
64. Richard Rorty, "Dewey between Hegel and Darwin," in Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870-1930, ed. Dorothy Ross (Baltimore, 1994), 46-68. In this essay Rorty acknowledges his debt to intellectual historians for demonstrating the difference between the historical Dewey and his "hypothetical version" but then contends that the ideas of Dewey's generation no longer make sense.
65. Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 5.
66. On pragmatism as the antithesis of literary theory and a rationale for critics to focus on recovering authors' intentions, see Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, "Against Theory," Critical Inquiry, 8 (Summer 1982), 723-42.
67. For the claim that we must supplement pragmatism with other value orientations (such as Marxism) because the pragmatic method "cannot help us do the social work of transformation," see Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago, 1983), 4. Stanley Fish argues that we create the meaning of texts when we interpret them; trying to catch what Fish means by pragmatism is thus like trying to catch a fly with a fish net.
68. See, for example, Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally (Durham, 1989). On one version of Fish's pragmatism, see the examination of legal theory below.
69. Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, 44, 46, 92, 131. Compare James's own cautionary words about language, which might seem to confirm Poirier's view: "Good and evil reconciled in a laugh! Don't you see the difference, don't you see the identity?" James asked. "By George, nothing but othing! That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure onsense!" James published these epigrams, however, to show how words that struck him as brilliant when he wrote them - under the influence of nitrous oxide - dissolved into meaninglessness when the nitrous oxide wore off. In such extravagant language, James said, "reason and silliness united."
70. See William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897; Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 219-20;
71. see also William James, The Principles of Psychology (2 vols., 1890; Cambridge, Mass., 1981), I, 254-55.
72. For an interpretation that stresses the instability of James's writings but emphasizes what James hoped to accomplish thereby, see William Joseph Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia, 1992).
73. William James to Gertrude Stein, May 25, 1910, William James Papers (Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.). On William James's letters to his brother Henry that contrast the writing of fiction with his own struggles against the "resistance" of "facts" and the ideas of "other philosophers," see R. W. B. Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York, 1991), 409-10.
74. Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, 166-67.
75. For an alternative view, see David Bromwich, "Recent Work in Literary Criticism," Social Research, 53 (Autumn 1986), 447. Too often, Bromwich writes (with Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton in mind), critics who indulge their own impulses as readers obliterate the past, minimizing "the differentness of the past," a consciousness of which "performs a critical function." Historical materials "are not altogether tractable: they will not do everything we want them to." When recounting changes in literary criticism, Poirier underscores Bromwich's point by shifting from the "linguistic skepticism" he endorses in theory to a commonsense reliance on shared meanings of words.
76. See Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, 171-93.
77. Richard J. Bernstein, John Dewey (New York, 1966);
78. Richard J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity (Philadelphia, 1971), 319, 314.
79. Bernstein, Restructuring of Social and Political Theory;
80. Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia, 1983), 18, 223.
81. Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History, 126;
82. Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 197;
83. interview with Putnam in Giovanna Borradori, The American Philosopher, trans. Rosanna Crocitto (Chicago, 1994), 60-61, 66.
84. Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 21;
85. Richard Rorty, "Putnam and the Relativist Menace," Journal of Philosophy, 90 (Sept. 1993), 449, 457.
86. Rorty, "Putnam and the Relativist Menace," 458;
87. Hilary Putnam, "Why Reason Can't Be Naturalized," in Hilary Putnam, Philosophical Papers, vol. III: Realism and Reason (New York, 1983), 229-47.
88. See also Richard Rorty, "Putnam on Truth," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 52 (June 1992), 415-18;
89. Hilary Putnam, "Truth, Activation Vectors, and Possessive Conditions for Concepts," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, ibid., 431-47.
90. Hilary Putnam, "The Question of Realism," in Hilary Putnam, Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 299-302.
91. Putnam, "Question of Realism," 305, 292n6.
92. On the early pragmatists' theory of voluntary action and its relation to their conception of truth, see James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York, 1986), 79-94.
93. Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, "Education for Democracy," in Putnam, Words and Life, ed. Conant, 227;
94. Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, "Dewey's Logic: Epistemology as Hypothesis," Words and Life, ibid., 218.
95. Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History, 215.
96. For a recent restatement of this argument, see Putnam, "Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity," in Putnam, Words and Life, ed. Conant, 151-81.
97. See Richard Rorty, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," Common Knowledge, 1 (Winter 1992), 140-53.
98. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford, Eng., 1992), 22, 32, 62, 76, 120-34.
99. See also David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman, eds., The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture (Ithaca, 1991).
100. On the difference between nineteenth- and twentieth-century hermeneutics, and the reasons why historians should recover the former, see Michael Ermarth, "The Transformation of Hermeneutics: 19th-century Ancients and 20th-century Moderns," Monist, 64 (April 1981), 176-94.
101. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938),
102. in Dewey, Later Works, ed. Boydston, XII, 74.
103. See also the thoughtful discussion in Richard Shusterman, "Dewey on Experience: Foundation or Reconstruction?," Philosophical Forum, 26 (Winter 1994), 127-48.
104. Giles Gunn, Thinking across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism (Chicago, 1992), 112-13.
105. For James's draft of the opening of his Gifford lectures in Edinburgh, the basis for The Varieties of Religious Experience,
106. see Perry, Thought and Character of William James, II, 328-29.
107. For an incisive discussion from an implicitly pragmatist perspective, see David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995).
108. John Dewey, "Creative Democracy - The Task before Us," in Dewey, Later Works, ed. Boydston, XIV, 228;
109. William James, The Social Value of the College Bred, in William James, Writings, 1902-1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York, 1987), 1245.
110. John Dewey, The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus, in John Dewey, The Early Works, 1882-1898, ed. Jo Ann Boydston(5 vols., Carbondale, 1967-1972), IV, 339;
111. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 344-45;
112. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 74-76;
113. John Dewey, Art as Experience, in Dewey, Later Works, ed. Boydston, X, 156.
114. Dewey, "Creative Democracy - The Task before Us," 224-30, esp. 226-28.
115. Dewey, "Creative Democracy - The Task before Us," Ibid., 228-30.
116. On this dimension of Dewey's pragmatism, see also Hilary Putnam, "A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy," in Pragmatism in Law and Society, ed. Michael Brint and William Weaver (Boulder, 1991), 217-43.
117. On the importance of pluralism to pragmatism, see also Putnam, Words and Life, ed. Conant, 194-95.
118. John Dewey, Individualism Old and New, in Dewey, Later Works, ed. Boydston, V, 115.
119. The assumption that knowledge inevitably masks and imposes power often underlies such charges of elitism. From a Deweyan perspective one might concede the point and ask what alternative is preferable to stipulating that democratic principles should shape the process of inquiry and the formation of those communities that evaluate knowledge claims. Particularly for scholars, the refusal to admit that there are better and worse - more and less democratic - ways to generate knowledge is self-defeating. See the judicious review essay: Thomas Bender, "Social Science, Objectivity, and Pragmatism," Annals of Scholarship, 9 (Winter-Spring 1992), 183-97.
120. William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology; And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (1899; New York, 1958), 188-89, 169, 19-20.
121. On James's tragic sensibility and Dewey's indomitable democratic faith, see Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 115-95, 340-415.
122. On James's politics, cf. the contrasting emphases of Deborah J. Coon, "'One Moment in the World's Salvation': Anarchism and the Radicalization of William James," Journal of American History, 83 (June 1996), 70-99;
123. George Cotkin, William James: Public Philosopher (Baltimore, 1990).
124. On Dewey's democratic ideas, cf. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy;
125. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York, 1995).
126. For the long-standard view of the differences between James's and Dewey's outlooks, see James Campbell, The Community Reconstructs: The Meaning of Pragmatic Social Thought (Urbana, 1992).
127. For criticism of Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and James Tufts for trying to moderate class conflict and to translate their Protestantism and republicanism into a reformism supposedly ill suited to the industrial era, see Andrew Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (Ithaca, 1993).
128. An imaginative analysis that credits Dewey and especially James with realizing that corporate capitalism ushered in possibilities for a "postmodern subjectivity" is James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (Chapel Hill, 1994).
129. Richard Rorty, "Solidarity or Objectivity," in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. Rajchman and West, 15-16;
130. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 166;
131. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York, 1989), xvi, 53, 189-90.
132. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 53;
133. Rorty, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," 140-53;
134. Rorty, Philosophical Papers, I, 210;
135. Richard Rorty, "The Intellectuals at the End of Socialism," Yale Review, 80 (April 1992), 1-16;
136. Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality," Yale Review, ibid., 81 (Oct. 1993), 1-20.
137. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 22, 37, 68;
138. Rorty, "Dewey between Hegel and Darwin," 65, 64.
139. John Dewey, "Nature in Experience," in Dewey, Later Works, ed. Boydston, XIV, 150;
140. Borradori, American Philosopher, trans. Crocitto, 117;
141. Rorty, "Dewey between Hegel and Darwin," 68.
142. On the contrast between Rorty's ideas about history, religion, ethics, and politics and those of other pragmatists, see James T. Kloppenberg, "Democracy and Disenchantment: From Weber and Dewey to Habermas and Rorty," in Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, ed. Ross, 69-90;
143. James T. Kloppenberg, "Knowledge and Belief in American Public Life," in Knowledge and Belief: Enlightenment Traditions and Modern Religious Thought, ed. William M. Shea and Peter A. Huff (New York, 1995), 27-51.
144. On the connection between Dewey's ideas about ethics and his commitment to democracy, see Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy.
145. See also Richard Rorty, "Intellectuals in Politics," Dissent, 38 (Fall 1991), 483-90.
146. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison, 1989), 4.
147. Cornel West, "Politics of American Neo-Pragmatism," in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. Rajchman and West, 259-72.
148. On West's account of American pragmatism and his "prophetic pragmatism," see Kloppenberg, "Knowledge and Belief in American Public Life."
149. Fine studies of philosophy, religion, and ethics from pragmatist perspectives are Henry Samuel Levinson, The Religious Investigations of William James (Chapel Hill, 1981);
150. Steven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York, 1991).
151. For a "modest pragmatism" that does not rely explicitly on Dewey but echoes many of his ideas, see Jeffrey Stout, Ethics after Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston, 1988).
152. Cornel West, Race Matters (1993; New York, 1994), 150-51.
153. For Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s description of West as "the preeminent African-American intellectual of our time," see Jack E. White, "Philosopher with a Mission," Time, June 7, 1993, pp. 60-62;
154. for another generous assessment of West, see Robert Boynton, "The New Intellectuals," Atlantic Monthly, 275 (March 1995), 53-70.
155. Compare the pyrotechnic display of ressentiment by Leon Wieseltier, "All and Nothing at All," New Republic, March 6, 1995, pp. 31-36.
156. For responses from readers (including Rorty), see "Decline of Cornel West," New Republic, ibid., April 3, 1995, pp. 6-7.
157. Richard Rorty, review of The American Evasion of Philosophy by Cornel West, Transition, 52 (1991), 75-77.
158. Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Chaos and Context: A Study in William James (Athens, Ohio, 1978);
159. Charlene Haddock Seigfried, William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy (Albany, 1990).
160. Seigfried brought together a group of essays with her introduction, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, "The Missing Perspective: Feminist Pragmatism," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 27 (Fall 1991), 405-74.
161. And see the special issue "Feminism and Pragmatism," ed. Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Hypatia, 8 (Spring 1993).
162. There are no specifically pragmatist or feminist doctrines about philosophical or political issues, according to Richard Rorty, "Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View," Hypatia, ibid., 96-103.
163. The special issue "Feminism and Pragmatism" contains essays on the importance of experience for early feminist pragmatists and responses to contemporary linguistic pragmatists.
164. See especially Jane Upin, "Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Instrumentalism beyond Dewey," Hypatia, 8 (Spring 1993), 38-63;
165. M. Regina Leffers, "Pragmatists Jane Addams and John Dewey Inform the Ethic of Care," Hypatia, ibid, 64-77;
166. Gregory Fernando Pappas, "Dewey and Feminism: The Affective and Relationships in Dewey's Ethics," Hypatia, ibid., 78-95;
167. Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, "Teasing Feminist Sense from Experience," Hypatia, ibid., 124-44;
168. Mitchell Aboulafia, "Was George Herbert Mead a Feminist?," Hypatia, ibid., 145-58;
169. Jane Duran, "The Intersection of Feminism and Pragmatism," Hypatia, ibid., 159-71;
170. Lynn Hankinson Nelson, "A Question of Evidence," Hypatia, ibid., 172-89.
171. For documents illuminating Jessie Taft's pragmatist feminism and demonstrating James's commitment to feminism in practice, see "Archive," Hypatia, ibid., 215-33.
172. For a persuasive case for historicizing the concept of experience and examining critically all appeals to experience that resembles the perspective I call pragmatic hermeneutics, see Joan Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry, 17 (Summer 1991), 773-97.
173. Cf. James T. Kloppenberg, "Objectivity and Historicism: A Century of American Historical Writing," American Historical Review, 94 (Oct. 1989), 1011-30.
174. For a feminist perspective on the uses of the concept of experience, see Lorraine Code, "Who Cares? The Poverty of Objectivism for a Moral Epistemology," Annals of Scholarship, 9 (Winter-Spring 1992), 1-18.
175. Joan Williams, "Gender Wars: Selfless Women in the Republic of Choice," New York University Law Review, 66 (Dec. 1991), 1559-1634.
176. See also Joan Williams, "Deconstructing Gender," Michigan Law Review, 87 (Feb. 1989), 797-845;
177. Joan Williams, "Virtue and Oppression," Nomos: Yearbook of the American Society of Political and Legal Philosophy, ed. John W. Chapman and William A. Galston (New York, 1992), 309-37.
178. Margaret Jane Radin, "The Pragmatist and the Feminist," in Pragmatism in Law and Society, ed. Brint and Weaver, 127-53.
179. See Joan Williams, "Critical Legal Studies: The Death of Transcendence and the Rise of the New Langdells," New York University Law Review, 62 (June 1987), 429-96.
180. Richard Posner, "What Has Pragmatism to Offer Law?," in Pragmatism in Law and Society, ed. Brint and Weaver, 42, 44.
181. See also Richard Posner, The Problems of Jurisprudence (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 150.
182. Stanley Fish, "Almost Pragmatism: The Jurisprudence of Richard Posner, Richard Rorty, and Ronald Dworkin," in Pragmatism in Law and Society, ed. Brint and Weaver, 63.
183. Stanley Fish, Pragmatism in Law and Society, Ibid., 71, 56. At an interdisciplinary conference on pragmatism held in November 1995 at the City University of New York, Fish was chosen to provide the closing remarks, which allowed him to offer as the last word on the subject his version of pragmatism - which might fairly be summarized as "anything goes." Although Bernstein, Putnam, and Westbrook participated in the conference, discussion centered on the ideas of thinkers such as Rorty and Fish. That focus reflects current academic debate; this essay attempts to demonstrate the differences between linguistic pragmatism and the ideas of earlier pragmatists and to show what has been lost in the transformation.
184. Stanley Fish, Pragmatism in Law and Society, Ibid., 72.
185. For versions of pragmatist legal theory more Deweyan than Rortyan (or Fishy), see especially: Thomas C. Grey, "What Good Is Legal Pragmatism?," in Pragmatism in Law and Society, ed. Brint and Weaver, 9-27;
186. Cornel West, "The Limits of Neopragmatism," Pragmatism in Law and Society, ibid., 121-26;
187. Radin, "Pragmatist and the Feminist," Pragmatism in Law and Society, ibid., 127-53;
188. Joan C. Williams, "Rorty, Radicalism, Romanticism: The Politics of the Gaze," Pragmatism in Law and Society, ibid., 155-80;
189. Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Civic Identity and the State," Pragmatism in Law and Society, ibid., 181-96;
190. Martha Minow and Elizabeth V. Spelman, "In Context," Pragmatism in Law and Society, ibid., 247-73;
191. Catharine Wells, "Situated Decisionmaking," Pragmatism in Law and Society, ibid., 275-93;
192. especially Putnam, "Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy," Pragmatism in Law and Society, ibid., 217-43.
193. Cass Sunstein, The Partial Constitution (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 127.
194. For criticism of Sunstein's program as reinstating the power of educated white male elites, see Robin West, "The Constitution of Reasons," Michigan Law Review, 92 (May 1994), 1409-37.
195. Cf. James T. Kloppenberg, "Deliberative Democracy and Judicial Supremacy," Law and History Review, 13 (Fall 1995), 393-411.
196. On the relation between pragmatism and legal realism, see Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York, 1992);
197. James T. Kloppenberg, "The Theory and Practice of Legal History," Harvard Law Review, 106 (April 1993), 1332-51.
198. Putnam, "Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy," 217.
199. On the link between this "modern view of truth" and democracy, see also Putnam and Putnam, "Dewey's Logic," 198, 215-17;
200. Hilary Putnam in Borradori, American Philosopher, trans. Crocitto, 61-62.
201. I am grateful to Richard Fox, Robert Westbrook, and Joan Williams for conversations that helped sharpen my understanding of the issues discussed in this paragraph.
202. Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
203. Bernstein, New Constellation, 326-39;
204. for Bernstein's extended discussion of Rorty, see Bernstein, New Constellation, ibid., 233-92.
205. See also Richard J. Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Cambridge, Eng., 1986), 260-72.
206. Jürgen Habermas, "Questions and Counterquestions," in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 198.
207. On the strange career of pragmatism in Europe, see Hans Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory, trans. Jeremy Gaines, Raymond Meyer, and Steven Minner (Chicago, 1993).
208. Joas has also written the best study of George Herbert Mead: Hans Joas, G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
209. See the significant restatement of pragmatism in Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast (Chicago, forthcoming).
210. Habermas, "Questions and Counterquestions," 196-98. Habermas traces refinements in his major works to insights derived from Mead's symbolic interactionism.
211. See the new concluding chapter written for the English edition of Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (1983; Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 195-202.
212. See Bernstein, "Resurgence of Pragmatism";
213. Richard J. Bernstein, "American Pragmatism: The Conflict of Narratives," in Rorty and Pragmatism, ed. Saatkamp, 54-67. Those contemporaries I have linked together as Deweyan critics of linguistic pragmatism do not necessarily share my perception of their similarities.
214. See, for example, Robert Westbrook, "A New Pragmatism," American Quarterly, 45 (Sept. 1993), 438-44;
215. and the spirited exchange: Giles Gunn, "Response to Robert Westbrook," American Quarterly, ibid., 46 (June 1994), 297-303;
216. Robert Westbrook, "Response to Giles Gunn," ," American Quarterly, ibid., 304-7.
217. By their qualifications and caveats, two recent endorsements of textualism illustrate the lure of a more Deweyan pragmatism. On the necessity of giving some determinate shape to the past even if one abandons grand narratives, see Dorothy Ross, "Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty," American Historical Review, 100 (June 1995), 675-77.
218. For an argument that "strong misreading" - of the sort Rorty recommends and Derrida practices - "is altogether misplaced as historical reading and critique" because "history does not emulate creative writing and is constrained by different norms of inquiry," see Dominick LaCapra, "History, Language, and Reading: Waiting for Grillon," American Historical Review, ibid., 814, 816.
219. James, Pragmatism, 111-12, 102-3;
220. Putnam, Words and Life, ed. Conant, 276-77;
221. Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (LaSalle, 1987), 70-71.
222. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988), 629.
223. For readings of American historians' practice that discern widespread if implicit commitment to something resembling pragmatic hermeneutics, see Kloppenberg, "Objectivity and Historicism";
224. Thomas Haskell, "Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream," History and Theory, 29 (no. 2, 1990), 129-57;
225. David A. Hollinger, "Postmodernist Theory and Wissenschaftliche Practice," American Historical Review, 96 (June 1991), 688-92.
226. On the relation between religious faith, social reform, and pragmatism, see Kloppenberg, "Knowledge and Belief in American Public Life."
227. On the inevitability of selection and interpretation in historical writing, see Putnam, Words and Life, ed. Conant, 206-7.
228. For a recent endorsement of pragmatism as an alternative to postmodern skepticism about historical truth, which recommends combining it with "practical realism" because pragmatism is otherwise rudderless due to its "deference to practice over principle," see Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1994), 283-91. This familiar but historically inaccurate characterization of pragmatism as nothing more than antifoundationalism underestimates its resources for historians' practice.
229. William James, "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," in James, Will to Believe, 141;
230. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, in Dewey, Middle Works, ed. Boydston, XII, 173.