Pragmatism and new directions for American philosophy: A turn to the future via commitment to scientific method

Abstract

The three founding fathers of pragmatism – Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey – heralded pragmatism as a movement that turned philosophy toward the future. From their perspective, pragmatic philosophy contrasted with traditional metaphysics that they interpreted as an attempt to discover the necessary presuppositions for the existence of a phenomenal world. Some pragmatists analyzed the quest for necessary presuppositions as a turn toward the past. Pragmatic philosophy also rejected a Humean or empiricist meta­physics according to which impressions or sense data were representative of an underlying reality. The Humean account, in which there was no future confirmation of the data of expe­rience, was considered by some pragmatist as a turn towards the present. The initiating turn towards the future within pragmatism was taken by Charles Pierce who defined the “real” as referring to what would be said to exist as a result of the convergence of a process of sci­entific inquiry towards the asymptotic limit of the inquiry. Thus, what was said to exist re­quired confirmation by future experience.James accepted a Piercian account of the true as fixed by a convergence of beliefs through a process of confirmation of the consequences of these beliefs over the long, long run. For Dewey, the acceptance of Pierce’s turn to the fu­ture led to the adoption of scientific method as an instrument for human prediction, control, and even future transformation of the environment. Deweyan pragmatism expanded the ap­plication of scientific method to problems of society and culture with a vision of corrigible and progressive reconstruction of American institutions.