## 1. The Meaning of Pragmatism: James



Pragmatism's key ideas originated in discussions at a so-called
'Metaphysical Club' that met in Harvard around 1870. (For
a popular history of this group, see Menand 1998.) Peirce and James
participated in these discussions along with some other philosophers,
psychologists and philosophically inclined lawyers. Peirce then
developed these ideas in publications from the 1870s, and they
achieved prominence through a series of public lectures given by James
in 1898. Both James and Peirce used 'pragmatism' as the
name of a method, principle, or 'maxim' for clarifying
concepts and hypotheses and for identifying empty disputes, though we
shall see significant differences in how they understood it.



When William James published a series of lectures on
'Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking' in
1907, he began by identifying 'The Present Dilemma in
Philosophy' (1907: 9ff), a fundamental and apparently
irresoluble clash between two ways of thinking, which he promised
pragmatism would overcome. James begins by observing that the history
of philosophy is 'to a great extent that of a certain clash of
human temperaments': the 'tough-minded' and the
'tender-minded'. The tough-minded have an empiricist
commitment to experience and going by 'the facts', while
the tender-minded prefer *a priori* principles which appeal to
ratiocination. The tender-minded tend to be idealistic, optimistic and
religious, believing in free will, while the tough-minded are
materialist, pessimistic, irreligious, dogmatic and fatalistic.



By the early twentieth century, James notes, 'our children
... are almost born scientific' (1907: 14f). But this has
not weakened religious belief. People need a philosophy that is both
empiricist in its adherence to facts yet finds room for faith. But all
that is on offer is 'an empirical philosophy that is not
religious enough and a religious philosophy that is not empirical
enough...' (1907: 15f). The challenge is to show how to
reconcile 'the scientific loyalty to facts' with
'the old confidence in human values and the resultant
spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type.'
Pragmatism is presented as the 'mediating philosophy': we
need to show how adherence to tough-minded epistemic standards does
not prevent our adopting the kind of worldview to which the
tender-minded aspire. Once we use what he introduced as the
'pragmatic method' to clarify our understanding of truth,
of free will, or of religious belief the disputes--which we
despaired of settling intellectually--begin to dissolve. William
James thus presented pragmatism as a 'method for settling
metaphysical disputes that might otherwise be interminable.'
(1907: 28) Unless some 'practical difference' would follow
from one or the other side's being correct, the dispute is
idle.



> 
> [T]he tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions,
> however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist
> in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect
> clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider
> 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. (1907: 29)
> 



The lectures explained this with a memorable illustration. On a visit
to the mountains, James' friends engage in a 'ferocious
metaphysical dispute' about a squirrel that was hanging on one
side of a tree trunk while a human observer was standing on the other
side:



> 
> This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving
> rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel
> moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree
> between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught.
> The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: *Does the man go
> round the squirrel or not?* (1907: 27f)
> 



James proposed that which answer is correct depends on what you
'practically mean' by 'going round'. If you
mean passing from north of the squirrel, east, south, then west, then
the answer to the question is 'yes'. If, on the other
hand, you mean in front of him, to his right, behind him, to his left,
and then in front of him again, then the answer is 'no'.
After pragmatic clarification disambiguates the question, all dispute
comes to an end. So James offers his pragmatism as a technique for
clarifying concepts and hypotheses so that metaphysical disputes that
appear irresoluble will be dissolved. A good example is the dispute
between free will and determinism: once we compare the practical
consequences of both positions we find no conflict. As James admitted,
he explained the pragmatic method through examples rather than a
detailed analysis of what it involves. He did little to explain
exactly what 'practical consequences' are. He also made no
claim to originality: 'Pragmatism represents a perfectly
familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude',
although he acknowledged that it did so 'in a more radical and
in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed'
(1907: 31). It shared with other forms of empiricism an
'anti-intellectualist tendency' (ibid), and it recognized
that theories (and presumably concepts) should be viewed as
'instruments, not answers to enigmas'.


## 2. The Pragmatic Maxim: Peirce



Peirce made this canonical statement of his Pragmatic Maxim in
'How to Make our Ideas Clear':



> 
> Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical
> bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our
> conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the
> object. (EP1: 132)
> 



This offers a distinctive method for becoming clear about the meaning
of concepts and the hypotheses which contain them. We clarify a
hypothesis by identifying the practical consequences we should expect
if it is true. This raises some questions. First: what, exactly is the
content of this maxim? What sort of thing does it recognize as a
practical consequence? Second, what use does such a maxim have?
Peirce's first simple illustrative example urges that what we
mean by calling something *hard* is that 'it will not be
scratched by many other substances.' In this way, then, I can
use the concept *hard* in certain contexts when I am wondering
what to do, and absent such contexts, the concept is empty. The
principle has something of a verificationist character: 'our
idea of anything *is* our idea of its sensible effects'
(EP1: 132). However the use of the phrase 'practical
consequences' suggests that these are to be understood as having
implications for what we will or should *do*. This is clear
from Peirce's later formulations, for example:



> 
> The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of
> all general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all
> the possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the
> acceptance of the symbol. (EP2: 346).
> 



So, for instance, if I want to break a window by throwing something
through it, then I need an object which is hard, not soft. It is
important that, as Peirce hints here, the consequences we are
concerned with are *general and intelligible*: we are to look
for laws that govern the behaviour of hard things and show how such
modes of behaviour can make a difference to what is rational for us to
do.



James never worked out his understanding of 'practical
consequences' as fully as Peirce did, and he does not share
Peirce's restriction of these consequences to general patterns
of behaviour. Sometimes he writes as if the practical consequences of
a proposition can simply be effects upon the individual believer: if
religious belief makes me feel better, then that contributes to the
pragmatic clarification of 'God exists'. James also hopes
that the attempt to clarify metaphysical hypotheses will reveal that
some propositions are empty or, more important, that, as in the
squirrel example, some apparent disagreements are unreal. Peirce sees
uses for his maxim beyond those James had in mind. He insisted that it
was a *logical* principle, in a broad sense of logic which
includes scientific methodology. So for instance he used it to clarify
concepts central to scientific reasoning such as *probability*,
*truth*, and *reality*. (We shall discuss his views on
truth and reality further below.) Pragmatism, described by Peirce as a
'laboratory philosophy', shows us how we test theories by
carrying out experiments in the expectation that if the hypothesis is
not true, then the experiment will fail to have some predetermined
sensible effect.



Peirce's description of his maxim as a logical principle is
reflected in passages where he presents it as a development of a
distinction that had been a staple of traditional logic texts, and
familiar to readers of Descartes, between ideas that are
*clear* and *distinct* (EP1: 126f). Peirce understood
the first grade of clarity about the meaning of a concept as being
able to identify instances of it, without necessarily being able to
say how. He then took his philosophical contemporaries to hold that
the highest grade of clarity, distinctness, is obtained when we can
analyze a concept into its elements by providing a verbal definition
(or, in more recent terminology, necessary and sufficient conditions
for its application). Peirce complained that 'nothing new is
ever learned by analyzing definitions', unless we already have a
clear understanding of the defining terms. He therefore announced that
the Pragmatic Maxim enabled a higher ('third') grade of
clarity, that supplemented the verbal definition with a description of
how the concept is employed in practice. 



As well as treating the Pragmatic Maxim as part of a constructive
account of the norms that govern inquiry, Peirce, like James, gave it
a negative role as a tool for demonstrating the emptiness of *a
priori* metaphysics. In section 3.1 we shall see how pragmatic
clarification of *reality* may be used to undermine a flawed
'nominalistic' conception of reality that led to the
'copy theory of truth', problematic Cartesian
certainty-seeking strategies in epistemology, and Kant's concept
of a 'thing in itself'. A more vivid non-logical example
of using the maxim to undermine spurious metaphysical ideas was
Peirce's early argument that the Catholic understanding of
transubstantiation was empty and incoherent. Since all we mean by
*wine* is something that has certain distinctive effects upon
the senses, 'to talk of something as having all the sensible
characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless
jargon' (EP1: 131f). It is important to note, however, that the
maxim is in the end only a tool for clarifying meaning; not
Peirce's theory of meaning proper. This is to be found in his
theory of signs or *semiotic*, which is discussed below (4.4).



## 3. Pragmatist Theories of Truth



Peirce and James differed in how they applied their respective
pragmatisms to clarifying the concept of *truth*.
Peirce's account of truth is presented as a means to
understanding a concept that he claimed was vital for the method of
science: *reality* (3.1). James used his account to defend
pluralism about truth (3.2).


### 3.1 Peirce on Truth and Reality



The final section of 'How to Make our Ideas Clear'
promises to consider a fundamental logical conception,
*reality*. This concept *seems* clear: 'every child
uses it with perfect confidence, never dreaming that he does not
understand it.' Thus it reaches Peirce's first level of
meaning-clarity. A (second-level) verbal definition of the concept is
also readily forthcoming: 'we may define the real as that whose
characters are independent of what anybody may think them to
be.' But, Peirce announces, we shall need to apply the Pragmatic
Maxim if our idea of reality is to be 'perfectly clear'.
At this stage the concept of *truth* enters the discussion:
Peirce claims that the object represented in a true proposition is our
best understanding of the real. So we have to turn to his remarks
about truth to see how the mind-independence alleged in the abstract
definition of reality is to be operationalized and thus properly
understood from a pragmatist perspective.



His pragmatic clarification of truth is expressed as follows:



> 
> The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who
> investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented
> in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.
> (EP1: 139)
> 



Seven years earlier, in a review of a new edition of the writings of
Berkeley, Peirce had described this way of thinking as the
'realist conception of reality' (EP1:88-9), in
contrast with a 'nominalist conception of reality' which
many early modern philosophers took for granted. Nominalists assume
that the real can only be the antecedent cause of singular sensations
which provide our evidence for beliefs about the external world. This
naturally leads to a certain (age-old) solipsistic skepticism
concerning whether a person can gain knowledge that transcends their
own perceptions and epistemic perspective. Peirce's pragmatist
clarification of truth offers an alternative conceptualization of
'being constrained by reality', in terms of
*consequent* convergence of opinion, through the process of
inquiry, rather than as an *antecedent* cause of sensations.



All this has led Peirce's account of truth to be expressed in
the slogan: *truth is the end of inquiry*, where
'end' is to be understood not as a 'finish'
(some point in time when all human questions will be settled) but as a
goal, telos or final cause. This original understanding of truth has
faced challenges that it is 'too realist' insofar as it
takes for granted that inquiry will converge on just one answer to any
given question. Here Bertrand Russell asked, 'Is this an
empirical generalization from the history of research? Or is it an
optimistic belief in the perfectibility of man?', concluding,
'Whatever interpretation we adopt, we seem committed to some
very rash assertion.' (1939: 146). Similarly, Quine wrote,
'...we have no reason to suppose that man's surface
irritations even unto eternity admit of any one systematization that
is scientifically better or simpler than all possible others'
(1960: 23). However, later in life Peirce urged that the hypothesis of
monistic convergence is best viewed as a *regulative hope*. In
1908, Peirce wrote to a friend, 'I do not say that it is
infallibly true that there is any belief to which a person would come
if he were to carry his inquiries far enough. I only say that that
alone is what I call Truth' (cited Haack 1976: 246). 



At the same time, others have criticised Peirce's account of
truth for not being realist enough, due to its 'internal
realist' definition of truth in terms of belief and inquiry. Can
there not be claims which no-one ever inquires into or believes, which
are nonetheless true? What about 'lost facts', such as the
number of cakes on a tray during a long-ago party (Johnston 2003: 91)?
Here Peirce arguably doubles down on his fallibilism (Legg 2014: 211).
How can we be sure that no amount of inquiry will settle such
matters?



> 
> ... it is unphilosophical to suppose that, with regard to any
> given question (which has any clear meaning), investigation would not
> bring forth a solution of it, if it were carried far enough...
> Who can be sure of what we shall not know in a few hundred years?
> (EP1: 140)
> 



The objectivism of Peirce's account of truth derives not from a
world entirely external to our minds (a famously difficult thing to
know), but from the *potential infinity* of the community of
inquiry, which exposes all of our beliefs to future correction:
'reality is independent, not necessarily of thought in general,
but only of what you or I or any finite number of [persons] may think
about it...' (EP1: 139). By means of this mathematical
analysis, Peirce deftly synthesises insights from traditional realisms
and idealisms (Legg 2014: 212; Lane 2018). 


### 3.2 James on Truth



James departed from Peirce in claiming that pragmatism was itself a
theory of truth. And his writings on this topic rapidly became
notorious. They are characteristically lively, offering contrasting
formulations, engaging slogans, and intriguing claims which often seem
to fly in the face of common sense. We can best summarize his view
through his own words:



> 
> The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way
> of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons. (1907: 42)
> 
> 
> '*The true', to put it very briefly, is only the
> expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right'
> is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.* Expedient in
> almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole, of
> course. (1907: 106)
> 
> 
> 



Other formulations fill this out by giving a central role to
experience:



> 
> Ideas ... become true just in so far as they help us to get into
> satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience. (1907: 34)
> 
> 
> Any idea upon which we can ride ...; any idea that will carry us
> prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part,
> linking things satisfactorily, working securely, saving labor; is true
> for just so much, true in so far forth, *true instrumentally*.
> (1907: 34)
> 
> 
> 



This might be taken to suggest that beliefs are made true by the fact
that they enable us to make accurate predictions of the future run of
experience, but other passages suggest that the 'goodness of
belief' can take other forms. James assures us that it can
contribute to the truth of a theological proposition that it has
'a value for concrete life' (1907: 40); and this can occur
because the idea of God possesses a majesty which can 'yield
religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds'
(1907:40). This suggests that a belief can be made true by the fact
that holding it contributes to our happiness and fulfilment.



The kind of passages just noted may seem to support Bertrand
Russell's famous objection that James is committed to the truth
of "Santa Claus exists" (Russell 1946, p, 772). This is
unfair; at best, James is committed to the claim that the happiness
that belief in Santa Claus provides is *truth-relevant*. James
could say that the belief was 'good for so much' but it
would only be 'wholly true' if it did not 'clash
with other vital benefits'. It is easy to see that, unless it is
somehow insulated from the broader effects of acting upon it, belief
in Santa Claus could lead to a host of experiential surprises and
disappointments.


## 4. Pragmatist Epistemology



The pragmatists saw their epistemology as providing a return to common
sense and experience and thus as rejecting a flawed philosophical
heritage which had distorted the work of earlier thinkers. The errors
to be overcome include Cartesianism, Nominalism, and the 'copy
theory of truth': these are all related.


### 4.1 Skepticism versus Fallibilism



The roots of pragmatism's anti-skepticism can be found in
Peirce's early (1868) paper 'Some Consequences of Four
Incapacities' (EP1: 28-30). Here he identifies
'Cartesianism' as a philosophical pathology that lost
sight of certain insights that were fundamental to scholastic thought
(for all its faults), and - he argued - more suited to the
philosophical needs of his own time. The paper begins by identifying
four problematic teachings of modern philosophy:


1. One can and should try to doubt all of one's beliefs at
once.
2. The ultimate test of certainty lies in individual
consciousness.
3. The 'multiform argumentation' characteristic of the
Middle Ages is replaced by a single chain of inference.
4. Where scholasticism consciously limited its explanatory capacity
(purporting to explain only 'all created things'),
Cartesianism's stated ambition to explain everything ironically
renders its own presuppositions hidden, mysterious and philosophically
dangerous.



The first, and in many ways most important of these Cartesian
teachings was the method of universal doubt. We should retain beliefs
only if they are absolutely certain and we are unable to doubt them.
The test of this certainty, as Peirce next points out, lies in whether
the individual consciousness is satisfied. Importantly, this
self-examination includes reflection on hypothetical possibilities: we
cannot trust our perceptual beliefs, for example, because we cannot
rule out that they might be produced by a dream, or an evil demon.
(See Hookway 2012, chapters 2,3.) The initial pragmatist response to
this is that it is a strategy that in practice we cannot carry out
effectively, and there is no reason to adopt it anyway. Peirce claims
that any attempt to adopt the method of doubt will be an exercise in
self-deception because we possess a variety of certainties which it
does not occur to us *can* be questioned. So what is produced
will not be 'real doubt'; these beliefs will lurk in the
background, influencing our reflection. Peirce urges us not to
'pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our
hearts' (EP1: 29). 



It is necessary to separate some different threads in his argument
here. First, there is something unnatural about the Cartesian
strategy. Inquiries normally occur within a context: we address
particular questions or problems, relying on background certainties
that it does not occur to us to doubt. The Cartesian suggestion that
we should begin by trying to doubt everything appears to be an attempt
to step outside of this. Second, the Cartesian strategy requires us to
reflect upon each of our beliefs and ask what reason we have for
holding it; skeptical challenges are then used to question the
adequacy of these reasons. This is again at odds with normal practice.
Many of our familiar certainties are such that we cannot offer any
concrete or convincing reason for believing them. We tend to treat our
established beliefs as innocent until 'proven guilty'. The
mere lack of a conclusive reason for belief does not itself provide us
with a reason for doubt.



Descartes, of course, might have conceded this, but responded that the
revision is required because once we allow error to enter our
belief-corpus we may be unable to escape from its damaging effects.
His was a time of methodological ferment, and he appreciated how many
false beliefs he himself had acquired from his teachers. The
pragmatist response here is to question some of Descartes'
assumptions about how we reason and form beliefs. First, his strategy
is individualist and 'to make single individuals absolute judges
of truth is most pernicious'. Peirce noted that the natural
sciences which were so conspicuously successful in Descartes'
day took a very different approach:



> 
> In sciences in which men come to agreement, when a theory has been
> broached, it is considered to be on probation until this agreement has
> been reached. After it is reached, the question of certainty becomes
> an idle one, because there is no one left who doubts it. We
> individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy
> which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the
> *community* of philosophers. (EP1: 29)
> 



Peirce also questions Descartes' understanding of reasoning in
holding that we may rely on 'a single thread of inference'
that is no stronger than its weakest link:



> 
> Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so
> far as to...trust rather to the multitude and variety of its
> arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should
> not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a
> cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are
> sufficiently numerous and intimately connected. (EP1: 29)
> 



Where the Cartesian holds that unless we begin from premises of which
we can be absolutely certain we may never reach the truth, the
pragmatist emphasises that, when we do go wrong, further discussion
and investigation can identify and eliminate errors, which is our best
hope for escaping their damaging effects. The possibility of error
provides us with reason to be 'contrite fallibilists',
rather than skeptics. The focus of epistemological inquiry should not
be on showing how we can possess *absolute certainty*, but on how
we can develop self-correcting methods of inquiry that make
*fallible progress*.



William James makes similar observations. In 'The Will to
Believe', he reminds us that we have two cognitive desiderata:
to obtain truth, and to avoid error (James 1897: 30). The harder we
try to avoid error, the more likely it is that we will miss out on
truth; and the more strenuously we search for truth, the more likely
we are to let in error. The method of doubt *may* make sense in
special cases where enormous weight is given to avoiding error, even
if that means loss of truth, but only there. Once we recognize that we
are making a practical and forced decision about the relative
importance of *two* goods, the Cartesian strategy no longer
appears the only rational one. Later, Dewey in *The Quest for
Certainty* similarly urged that a focus on eliminating all error
from our beliefs is both doomed and destructive, with the added twist
of a social diagnosis of the quest itself: the uncertainty, pain and
fear of much early human life led to the erection of
'priestly' forms of knowledge which in promising to
intercede with a Heavenly stability, sundered *a priori* theory
from *a posteriori* practice, thereby enabling the knowing
classes to insulate themselves from a more humble (and realistic)
empiricism. The 'quest' continues, however, in many
debates in contemporary mainstream epistemology.


### 4.2 Inquiry



Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries
in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic
epistemology centres around the concept of *knowledge*,
considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist
epistemology centres around the concept of *inquiry*, considered
as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So
pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues
that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or
guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is
Peirce's classic early paper "The Fixation of
Belief". Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to
replace doubt with 'settled belief', and that the only
method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some
of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently
reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are *correct* is
the *Method of Science*, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim
described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing
belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one's
favored beliefs (the *Method of Tenacity*), ii) accepting an
institution's dictates (the *Method of Authority*), iii)
developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set
(the *A Priori Method*). Notable recent reinterpretations and
defenses of Peircean pragmatist epistemology include (Haack 1993 and
Cooke 2007). (See also Skagestad 1981.)



Dewey's conception of inquiry, found in his *Logic: the
Theory of Inquiry* is also rich, and arguably more radical than
Peirce's in its underlying ontology (ED2: 169-79). Dewey
sees inquiry as beginning with a problem; it aims for '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' (ED2: 171). As John E. Smith notes, where
'Peirce aimed at "fixing" belief, Dewey aimed at
"fixing" the situation' (1978: 98). It is important
to note that here the situation is *objectively* indeterminate,
and is itself transformed by inquiry. The 'pattern of
inquiry' that Dewey describes is common to the
information-gathering of animals, practical problem solving, common
sense investigations of our surroundings and scientific inquiry. He
recognizes that when we face a problem, our first task is to
understand it through describing its elements and identifying their
relations. Identifying a concrete question that we need to answer is a
sign that we are making progress. And the 'logical forms'
we use in the course of inquiry are understood as ideal instruments,
tools that help us to transform things and resolve our problem. The
continuities Dewey finds between different kinds of inquiry are
evidence of his naturalism and his recognition that forms of
scientific investigation can guide us in all areas of our lives. All
the pragmatists, but most of all Dewey, challenge the sharp dichotomy
that other philosophers draw between theoretical beliefs and practical
deliberations. In some sense, all inquiry is practical, concerned with
transforming and evaluating the features of situations in which we
find ourselves. Shared inquiry directed at resolving social and
political problems or indeterminacies was also central to
Dewey's conception of the good life and, relatedly, the
democratic ideal. (Recently other pragmatists, closer to Peirce than
Dewey, have developed this idea: see for instance Talisse 2008; Misak
1999; Westbrook 1991.)


### 4.3 Pragmatist Conceptions of Experience



The Pragmatic Maxim suggests that pragmatism is a form of empiricism
(an idea recently explored further in Wilson 2016). Our ability to
think about so-called external things, and steadily improve our
understanding of them, rests upon our experience. Yet most pragmatists
adopted accounts of experience and perception radically different from
the views of modern empiricists from John Locke and David Hume to
Rudolf Carnap, as well as the 'intuition' posited by Kant.
The established view interpreted experience as what is sometimes
(following C.I. Lewis and Wilfrid Sellars) called 'the
given': we are passive recipients of determinate and singular
'sense-data'. Experience provides raw material for
knowledge, but does not itself have content informed by concepts,
practical needs, or anything else non-sensory. Our only contact with
the external world is through receiving such experiences. So this way
of thinking about experience can easily lead to skepticism about the
so-called 'external world'.



In different ways, Peirce, James, and Dewey all argued that experience
is far richer than this, and that earlier philosophers were mistaken
to claim that we could identify 'experiences' or
'sense-data' as antecedents to, or separable constituents
of, cognition. We can begin with James' *radical
empiricism*, of which he said that 'the establishment of the
pragmatist theory of truth [was] a step of first-rate importance in
making [it] prevail' (1909: 6f). The connection with pragmatism
is evident from the fundamental 'postulate' of radical
empiricism: 'the only things that shall be debatable among
philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from
experience'. But this requires that experience be newly
understood. First, he announced that 'the relations between
things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters
of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the
things themselves.' And, second, he concludes that 'the
parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that
are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe
needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but
possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous
structure.'



Peirce too emphasizes the continuous character of perceptual
experience, and adds that we directly perceive external things as
external, as 'other', that we can perceive necessary
connections between events, and that experience contains elements of
generality (citing a picture of a connected series of circles which
can be seen *as* a stone wall, in the manner of
Wittgenstein's famous duck-rabbit dual diagram). Around
1902-3, Peirce developed a complex and original theory of
perception which combines a *percept*, which is entirely
non-cognitive, with a *perceptual judgement*, which is structured
propositionally and lies in the space of reasons. In this way he seeks
to capture how perception is both immediately felt and
truth-evaluable. In contrast to standard British Empiricist analyses
of the relation between impressions and ideas, Peirce does not claim
that a perceptual judgment *copies* its percept. Rather, it
*indexes* it, just as a weather-cock indicates the direction of
the wind. Although percept and perceptual judgment are intrinsically
dissimilar, over time certain habits of association between the two
are reinforced, leading them to (literally) grow in our minds and link
with other habits. This enables percepts and perceptual judgments to
mutually inform one another, to the point where every perception is
fallible and subject to reinterpretation in the light of future
perceptions (Legg 2017). The end result is that, as Peirce puts it, in
stark contrast to the accepted understanding of experience as
'given': '[n]othing at all...is absolutely
confrontitional', although, 'the confrontitional is
continually flowing in upon us' (CP 7.653). 



Dewey's account of experience, which is central to his entire
philosophy, contributes an additional twist. Like Peirce, he thought
that experience was 'full of inference', but he arguably
took the notion further from the mere contents of individual
consciousness than any previous pragmatist. For Dewey, experience is a
process through which we transact with our surroundings and meet our
needs. He wrote:



> 
> Like its congeners life and history, [experience] includes *what*
> men do and suffer, *what* they strive for, love, believe and
> endure, and also *how* men act and are acted upon, the ways in
> which they do and suffer, desire and enjoy, see, believe, imagine, in
> short, processes of *experiencing* (LW1:18).
> 



What we experience is shaped by our habits of expectation and there is
no basis for extracting from this complex process the kind of
'thin given' beloved of sense datum theorists. We
experience all sorts of objects, events and processes, and just as
experience is inextricable from the 'external' world of
things, *Nature* (its co-ordinate concept: what is experienced)
is inextricable from the 'internal' world of concepts.



In sharp contrast to Dewey, neopragmatism no longer takes experience
as an explicit philosophical theme. Rorty began his pre-pragmatist
philosophical career as an eliminative materialist, and the view
survives in *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature*, newly
bolstered by Sellarsian concerns about the 'myth of the
given'. On this basis, Rorty declares that 'Dewey should
have dropped the term "experience" rather than redefining
it... He should have agreed with Peirce that a great gulf divides
sensation and cognition, [and] decided that cognition was possible
only for language users...' (Rorty 1998: 297). Similarly,
Brandom focusses his attention exclusively on linguistic meaning
(albeit in this case *qua* rationalist), and has famously ruled
that (as 'blasphemy' was to Oscar Wilde)
'experience' is 'not one of his words'
(Brandom 2011: 197). This neopragmatist neglect of one of classical
pragmatism's central concepts has become a major point of
contention on the part of many New Pragmatists (e.g. Koopman 2007;
Levine 2010, 2012; Sachs 2015).


### 4.4 Representations



Having discussed pragmatists' emphases upon the activity of
inquiry and the thickness of experience, we turn to their views about
the nature of thought. It has been common for philosophers to assume
that the 'content' of a thought, judgment or proposition
is a kind of *intrinsic property* that it possesses. Perhaps it
offers a 'picture' or 'idea' of some state of
affairs, and we can identify this content simply by reflecting upon
the item itself, and its structural properties. All pragmatists have
rejected this idea as a key driver of an antinaturalistic *Cartesian
dualism*. Instead, they have held that the content of a thought,
judgment or proposition is a matter of the role it fills in our
activities of inquiry, and is to be explained by reference to how we
interpret it or what we do with it. This shall be illustrated by
considering three particular pragmatist views.



First, all of the classic pragmatists identified beliefs and other
mental states as *habits*. According to Peirce, our beliefs
'[g]uide our desires and shape our actions' (EP1: 114).
The content of a belief is determined by its role in determining our
actions. This was reflected in Peirce's formulations of his
Pragmatic Maxim. In order to be clear about the content of a concept
or hypothesis, we must reflect upon its role in determining what we
should do in the light of our desires and our background knowledge. In
Robert Brandom's terminology, the philosopher 'makes
explicit' aspects of our practice that are implicit in our
habits and dispositions. The role of tacit habits of reasoning and
acting in fixing our beliefs and guiding our actions is a theme that
recurs in the work of the pragmatists, and is now finding strong
echoes in recent empirically informed work on '4E'
cognition, which is embodied, embedded, enactive and extended. (For an
accounts of this research area which explicitly engage classical
pragmatism, see Menary 2007 and Gallagher 2017.)



The second illustration concerns a passage in which James defended his
account of truth by urging that it was the concept used in successful
science. He identified the 'traditional view' that, for
early scientists, the 'clearness, beauty and
simplification' provided by their theories led them to think
that they had deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the
Almighty. By contrast, contemporary scientists held that 'no
theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any of them may
from some point of view be useful ...'. A scientific theory
was to be understood as 'an instrument: it is designed to
achieve a purpose--to facilitate action or increase
understanding' (James 1907: 33). For James and Dewey, this holds
of all our concepts and theories: we treat them as instruments to be
judged by how well they achieve their intended purpose.



The third illustration comes from Peirce's general theory of
signs, or *semiotics*, which was developed entirely independently
of the more well-known semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure, and is one
of the most original areas of his thought. Peirce's semiotics
offers an account of the contents of thoughts as well as language,
visual media, music and any other item that can be said to have
meaning (for introductions to this area of Peirce's thought, see
Liszka 1996; Short 2007). Unlike Saussure, Peirce insisted that the
sign-relation was essentially *triadic* in structure,
comprising a representation, an object and an interpretation. In other
words: a sign is 'about' some object because it is
understood, in subsequent thought, as a sign of that object. This
subsequent thought Peirce calls the sign's
*interpretant*. In understanding or interpreting a sign, we may
feel things about it (which at times Peirce called the *emotional
interpretant*), undertake actions that are rational in the light of
the sign and the other information we possess (the *dynamic
interpretant*), or an indefinite number of inferences may be drawn
from it (the *logical interpretant*) (Jappy 2016). Interpretation
is generally a goal-directed activity and, once again, the content of
a sign is determined by the ways in which we use it (or might do
so).



A further triadic distinction deriving from Peirce's theory of
signs which has been influential in disciplines from Biology to Media
Studies holds between three ways in which a sign may pick out its
*object*:


1. by resembling it (or more generally, by possessing the very
properties that the sign aims to signify), e.g. a map
2. by indicating it in some brute unmediated fashion, e.g. a
weather-vane signifying the wind's direction
3. via some arbitrary convention that must be learned, e.g. words in
English.



These three kinds of signs Peirce termed: *icon*, *index*
and *symbol* respectively. Meanwhile, the three ways in which a
sign may give rise to its *interpretant* were categorised by
Peirce as:


1. the rheme (essentially: a term)
2. the proposition
3. the argument



Peirce's sign theory continued to richly evolve and clarify
itself right to the end of his life (Jappy 2016; Bellucci 2017),
albeit by means of some rather forbidding special-purpose technical
terminology. 


## 5. Further pragmatists


### 5.1 The Early Years



It would be wrong to conclude that pragmatism was restricted to the
United States or that the only important pragmatist thinkers were
Peirce, James and Dewey. As is documented by Thayer, there were
pragmatists in Oxford, in France and, especially, in Italy in the
early years of the twentieth century (Thayer 1968, part III, Baldwin
2003: 88-9). Moreover we can mention several other important
American pragmatists, for example Josiah Royce. Commonly thought to be
an idealist opponent of James and a critic of pragmatism, Royce
increasingly came to be influenced by Peirce's work on signs and
on the community of inquirers and was acknowledged as a fellow
pragmatist by Peirce himself. C.I. Lewis, the teacher of Quine and of
several generations of Harvard philosophers developed a philosophy
that was a sort of pragmatist Kantianism. Murray Murphey has
identified him as 'the last great pragmatist' (Murphey
2005). In books such as *Mind and the World Order* (1929), he
defended a pragmatist conception of the *a priori*, holding that
our choices of laws of logic and systems of classification were to be
determined by pragmatic criteria (Lewis 1923, 1929; Murphey 2005:
chapters four and five). Of comparable importance was George Herbert
Mead, whose contribution to the social sciences has been noted. The
work of Frank Ramsey at Cambridge (Ramsey 1926) in the 1920s developed
Peirce's views on statistical reasoning and on inquiry in ways
that provided fertile research programmes through much of the century,
for example in the work of Isaac Levi at Columbia (Levi 2012). As a
number of scholars have documented (Boncompagni 2016; Goodman 2002),
Wittgenstein's later thought acquired a pragmatist flavour
through his reading of James's *Varieties of Religious
Experience* (1902).


### 5.2 Neopragmatism



Where Peirce and Dewey--and even perhaps James--were engaged
in working out systematic philosophical visions, Rorty treated
'pragmatism' as a more critical or therapeutic
philosophical project. What pragmatists teach us about *truth*,
he tells us, is that there is nothing very systematic or constructive
to be said about it. In particular, the concept does not capture any
metaphysical relation between our beliefs and utterances, on the one
hand, and reality on the other. We can describe what we *do* with
the word 'true': we use it to express our endorsement of
beliefs and sentences, and sometimes we might find it useful to
express our fallibility by saying that some of our beliefs may not be
true. (Rorty calls this the 'cautionary' use of the term.)
But, beyond talking about the rather trivial formal properties of the
concept, there is nothing more to be said. He also uses what he
describes as a 'pragmatist' principle to show that truth
cannot be our aim when we inquire. This principle holds that we can
only adopt something as an aim when we are able to recognize that it
has been achieved. And since we are fallible, we are never in a
position to prove that one of our beliefs is actually true--all
we can recognize is that it meets standards of acceptance that are
endorsed, for the time being, in our community (Rorty 1991a: chapter
one; 2000; Hookway 2007). This consequentialist reading of pragmatist
ideas is also reflected in his account of how we can criticize and
revise our view of the world. We should be free to propose new
'vocabularies'--systems of classification and
description. We do not test these vocabularies by seeing whether they
enable us to discover *truths* or by showing that they can be
read off the nature of reality. Instead, we evaluate them by seeing
how they enable us to achieve our current goals, formulate better and
more satisfying goals, and generally become better at being human
(Rorty 1995).



Hilary Putnam has at times denied that he is a pragmatist because he
does not think that a pragmatist account of truth can be sustained.
Indeed, he shows little sympathy for the pragmatic maxim. However, he
has written extensively on James, Peirce, and Dewey--often in
collaboration with Ruth Anna Putnam--and has provided insightful
accounts of what is distinctive about pragmatism, and what can be
learned from it (See Putnam 1994a). He has identified four
characteristics of pragmatism: the rejection of skepticism; the
willingness to embrace fallibilism; the rejection of sharp dichotomies
such as those between fact and value, thought and experience, mind and
body, analytic and synthetic etc; and what he calls 'the primacy
of practice' (1994c). With the turn of the twenty first century,
he made ambitious claims for the prospects of a pragmatist
epistemology. After surveying the apparent failures of the original
enlightenment project, and attributing them to the fact that
enlightenment philosophers were unable to overcome the fundamental
dichotomies mentioned above, he expresses the hope that the future
might contain a 'pragmatist enlightenment' (Putnam
2004:89-108). The rich understanding of experience and science
offered by pragmatists may show us how to find an objective basis for
the evaluation and criticism of institutions and practices. He is
particularly struck by the suggestion that pragmatist epistemology, by
emphasizing the communal character of inquiry and the need to take
account of the experiences and contributions of other inquirers,
provides a basis for a defence of democratic values (1993:
180-202). This may be related to Rorty's suggestion that
pragmatists insist upon the priority of democracy over philosophy
(Rorty 1991b).



Another symptom of a pragmatist revival is found in the work of Robert
Brandom. Brandom's philosophical interests are rather different
from those of the classical pragmatists, of whom he is quite critical
(Brandom 2011), and who do not noticeably influence his work. His
views owe more to philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars and Quine, his
teacher Richard Rorty, and historical readings in thinkers such as
Kant and Hegel. As noted above, his concerns are mostly with semantics
and the philosophy of language. By contrast to the representationalism
deplored by many neopragmatists, he develops a version of
*inferentialist* semantics in order to construct accounts of our
use of words like 'true' and 'refers to' which
are liberated from the idea that the function of thought and language
is 'to provide a transcript of reality'. The connection to
pragmatism is that his approach to language is focused upon what we
*do* with our practices of making assertions and challenging or
evaluating the assertions of others. What constitutes an assertion is
its *normative pragmatics*: it is the smallest unit of language
for which we can take responsibility within a 'game of giving
and asking for reasons'. Logical relations are then explicated
in terms of the entitlements to make further moves in this
'language-game', which flow from the commitments one has
assumed through one's previous assertions (Brandom 1994; Brandom
2000). Brandom also joins the pragmatists in denying that
*truth* is a substantial metaphysical property that can be
possessed by some propositions and not by others, and in seeking to
reconstructing an account of reference which makes a difference in
practice (his favored strategy is, broadly, explaining
language-users' capacity to perform anaphora). In (Brandom 2008)
he goes further to discuss how different vocabularies understood
pragmatically might be translated into-- or reduced to-- one
another, thereby constructing an overall account of the relationship
between 'saying' and 'doing' that he hopes
will form a basis for reintegrating analytic and pragmatist
philosophy. 



Another notable recent foray into pragmatist-inspired normative
pragmatics is found in the work of Jurgen Habermas, a philosopher
from the Frankfurt School who has engaged with unparalleled breadth
across the landscape of 20th century philosophy. He manages to combine
analytic philosophers' goal of systematically theorising
language with a neo-Marxian and hermeneutic critique of modernity,
whilst drawing on Mead's pragmatist analysis of the self as
irremediably social. His central concept of *communicative
action* (Habermas 1981) is advocated as a foil to the
instrumentalist rationality that he takes to be rampantly colonising
the human 'lifeworld' in the West. The *discourse ethics* which he develops in order to scaffold an authentic communicative
action that is free from the distortions of power and ideology owes
much to pragmatism's concept of the community of inquiry,
although he is sceptical of Peirce's inquiry-based analysis of
truth as overly idealised (Habermas 2003). With major contributions in
political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of law, aesthetics and
philosophy of religion, amongst other areas, Habermas' influence
has reached far into the social sciences - something Dewey would
likely have approved. 


## 6. Pragmatism's Contribution in Other Areas of Philosophy


### 6.1 Philosophy of Religion



We have noted that a strong motivation for James' interest in
pragmatism was exploring truth in religion. He drew on his dual
training in philosophy and psychology for his famous book *The
Varieties of Religious Experience*: a unique compendium of
testimonies concerning matters such as prayer, worship and mystical
experience. These rich personal observations present an extended
example of the 'radical empiricism' introduced in 4.3.
James thereby sought to trenchantly critique the intellectual methods
of contemporary theology ('the metaphysical monster which they
offer to our worship is an absolutely worthless invention of the
scholarly mind' (James 1902: 447)). James also advanced a
celebrated argument for religious faith in his paper "The Will
to Believe": that for questions that are living, forced and
momentous (though only for those), 'faith based on desire is
certainly a lawful, and possibly an indispensable thing'. He
thereby confronted his contemporary William Clifford's
evidentialist claim that, 'It is wrong always, everywhere, and
for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence'
(1877), generating a lively discussion which continues today (e.g.
Bishop 2007; Aikin 2014). 



Despite James' efforts to tightly circumscribe his
argument's application, Peirce objected to such concessions in
epistemology, calling the paper in a letter to James, 'a very
exaggerated utterance, such as injures a serious man very much'
(Misak 2013: 64). Peirce himself evolved from an early positivistic
disdain for religious questions to producing his own theistic
arguments in later life. In 1893, he published an essay entitled
"Evolutionary Love", which passionately contested the
social Darwinism promulgated by many prominent thinkers in his era,
most notably Herbert Spencer (Pearce 2020), which he called 'The
Gospel of Greed'. Here Peirce urges that amongst the three ways
the Universe may unfold: (i) by chance, (ii) deterministically, (iii)
through creative love, the third path is the highest and most likely
to endure since '...growth comes only from love, from I
will not say self-sacrifice, but from the ardent impulse to fulfill
another's highest impulse' (CP 6.289). In his final years
Peirce produced the remarkable essay "A Neglected Argument for
the Reality of God". Here he argued for God's
*reality*, not *existence*, to signal an ontological
priority of intelligible principles over efficient causes. The piece
is structured into three argumentative layers: (i) The Humble Argument
(an invitation to a phenomenological experiment) which is enfolded by,
(ii) The Neglected Argument (an original version of the Ontological
Argument) which is enfolded by, (iii) The Scientific Argument (a
prophecy of the fullness of future scientific inquiry). Work is
ongoing to draw out this unique piece's full meaning. 



Dewey turned his hand to religious questions in his 1934 book *A
Common Faith*. Here he argued that--contrary to what many
believe--removing faith in supernatural entities will not destroy
religion, but rather set it free from the many 'creeds and
cults' reflecting outdated social structures that currently
survive fossilised inside religious institutions. Rather than being
embodied by any kind of *entity*, he argued, the sacred is a
phase or quality of *experience*, namely, 'some complex of
conditions that have operated to affect an orientation in
life...that brings with it a sense of security and peace'
(LW9:13). Such conditions might equally be found in a forest or art
gallery as a church or temple. Despite its sophisticated argumentation
and originality, as an explication of religious life Dewey's
approach has been considered abstract and somewhat anodyne. 


### 6.2 Ethics



We've seen that philosophical pragmatism seeks to connect theory
to practice. In ethics it can seem natural to interpret this as
recommending that normative notions be reduced to practical utility.
Thus James embraced utilitarian ethics as one of the branches of
pragmatism (James 1907). Peirce, however, took a different view.
Initially (around 1898) his naturalism led him to advocate a
*sentimentalism* according to which ethical questions should be
settled by instinct, as our conscious reasoning is too recently
evolved and fallible to determine 'vitally important
matters'. But around 1902 he began to warm towards ethical
theorising, as he developed a philosophical architectonic which placed
ethics directly prior to logic, since ethics studies what is good in
action, and logic studies what is good in thought, which is a species
of action. He noted, though, that such a 'normative
science' should be understood to study what goodness *is*,
not whether particular actions are good (by contrast to much normative
ethics today) since, 'a science cannot have for its fundamental
problem to distribute objects among categories of its own
creation' (CP 2.198). Recently scholars have turned with renewed
interest to developing Peirce's ethics (e.g. Massecar 2016;
Atkins 2016). 



A rich and systematic early contribution to pragmatist value theory
was made by Alain Locke, who wrote, 'the gravest problem of
contemporary philosophy is how to ground some normative principle or
criterion of objective validity for values without resort to dogmatism
and absolutism on the intellectual plane, and without falling into
their corollaries, on the plane of social behavior and action, of
intolerance and mass coercion' (Locke 1935: 336). Locke taught
that the distinctive feeling-qualities that values give rise to in us
are our ultimate guide in studying them, although function has an
important secondary role to play. He held the resulting axiology to be
pluralist, as well as culturally relativist.



Dewey also sought to steer ethics between the traditional poles of an
objectivism derived from some kind of human-transcendent authority,
and a subjectivism derived from individual preference. He believed
that both views err in granting the moral agent an identity prior to
interactions with others. For Dewey, we are more frail beings than
this, embedded in a sociality that runs much deeper, and the purpose
of moral theory is ultimately to provide constructive methods for
addressing human problems of a particular kind: those in which we find
ourselves unable to choose between equally valuable ends, with a
dearth of salient habits with which to cross the breach. With regard
to such questions, much effort is required to clear away traditional
ethical theory's pretensions to deliver a spurious settled
certainty. Progress can be made by recognising the inherent
uncertainty of moral problems and the complexities of moral experience
(Hildebrand 2008: 73), and being willing to inquire anew in every
moral context, drawing in data from a variety of scientific
disciplines, in order to lay down new intelligent habits. The
evolution of Dewey's ethical thinking across his long career is
richly explored in (Welchman 1995). 



In recent decades, value theory has arguably been under-addressed by
pragmatists, due to neopragmatism's strong focus on philosophy
of language and metaphilosophy. A notable recent attempt to develop a
pragmatist metaethics drawing on classical pragmatism is (Heney 2016),
which forms part of the so-called New Pragmatism. 


### 6.3 Aesthetics



When (around 1902) Peirce defined ethics as a normative science
directly prior to logic, he also defined aesthetics as a normative
science directly prior to ethics (since aesthetics studies goodness in
and of itself, which may then be used to understand good action). This
focus on the intrinsically good or admirable broadens the purview of
aesthetics, which Peirce claims 'has been handicapped by the
definition of it as the theory of beauty' (CP 2.199, 1902).
Aesthetics is one of the least well worked-out areas of Peirce's
philosophy; nevertheless he says some intriguing and suggestive things
about it. For instance he argues that the so-called *summum
bonum* (ultimate good) really consists in the growth of
'concrete reasonableness' (CP 1.602; 1.615; 2.34; 5.121;
5.433), as the only phenomenon 'whose admirableness is not due
to an ulterior reason' must be the furthering of Reason itself
(CP 1.615, 1903). Recent further development of this framework
includes (Kaag 2014; Gava 2014). 



James did not make sustained contributions to aesthetics, but Dewey
did, particularly in his 1934 book *Art as Experience*. Dewey
viewed aesthetic appreciation as a peak human experience and
'the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of
humanity' (LW10:31, cited in Hildebrand 2008: 146). Consequently
the most important question in this area of philosophy is not how to
define necessary and sufficient conditions for Art, but how to enable
ordinary people to enjoy more of it, so that their lives might be more
meaningful. The way forward, Dewey suggested, is to learn to fetishize
professionally-curated contexts and Art objects less, in order to open
our eyes to consummatory experiences as they occur in the everyday
experience of the 'live creature'. Examples of such
consummations include: '[a] piece of work is finished in a way
that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is
played through...' (LW10:42). In contrast to such
integrated completions within experience, both hedonistic dissipation
and rigid self-control count as 'anesthetic'. True art
alternates between doing and undergoing. Notable recent work building
on Dewey's aesthetics includes Richard Shusterman's
*somaesthetics*, which extends pragmatism's defining
interest in agency to exploring the complex role of the human body in
aesthetic experience (Shusterman 1992; 2012).


### 6.4 Philosophy of Education



Peirce had some insightful things to say about pedagogy which
anticipate today's 'inquiry-based learning' and
'research-led teaching', but they are scattered across his
writings (Strand 2005). The giant figure in philosophy of education is
of course Dewey, who pioneered and established it as a separate sphere
of study when he first assumed the chair in Philosophy at University
of Chicago in 1894. Dewey's career coincided with a period in
which North America's population was rapidly growing,
industrializing and urbanizing, shifting education delivery out of the
home into public institutions, and his ideas had enormous impact. Many
of his suggestions derive from his vision of democracy as not merely a
system of voting but the idea that every societal institution might be
designed to foster maximum flourishing in every citizen. Viewed from
this angle, traditional modes of schooling whereby teachers deliver an
approved (often employer-sanctioned) set of facts for children to
memorise count as despotic. Instead the emphasis should be on enabling
children to grow from within, according to their present interests and
capabilities, and become lifelong learners, although Dewey equally
criticises certain romantic, 'child-centred' educational
theorists of his day for neglecting to direct or guide the
child's interests in any particular direction (Hildebrand 2008:
127). It's also worth noting that Dewey sees education as
primarily a social not an individual process since, as noted above, he
views human identity formation as irremediably social. 



The result is a 'problem-centred pedagogy' which looks to
pragmatist epistemology understood as the theory of inquiry for its
structure. The teacher begins by facilitating contact with some
phenomenon which proves genuinely puzzling to the students, then
guides them through a cycle of inquiry which (if all goes well)
resolves the problematic situation to the satisfaction of all present.
This cycle of inquiry includes as stages: articulating the problem and
questions which might need to be answered in its resolution, gathering
data, suggesting hypotheses which might potentially resolve the
problem, and testing or otherwise evaluating those hypotheses. Opening
up the classroom to such 'live' thinking generates
unpredictability which can be challenging for the teacher to manage,
but if the genuine indeterminacy of the problematic situation can be
successfully navigated, the reward will be students who have learned
not just how to *know*, but how to *think*. In that regard,
Dewey claimed that his writings on education summed up his entire
philosophical position (Hildebrand 2008: 124). For Dewey, all
philosophy was philosophy of education.