School · 1839 CE–1952 CE
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is American traditions connecting meaning and truth to inquiry, practice, fallibility, experience, and democratic life.
Shared questions
- How should ideas be assessed through their role in inquiry and practical consequences?
Internal disagreements
- Whether truth is correspondence, warranted assertion, long-run inquiry, or a plural relation to human practices.
Key texts
- How to Make Our Ideas Clear · 1878 — Peirce's statement of the pragmatic maxim, which he later renamed pragmaticism to distance it from James.
- Pragmatism · 1907 — James's lectures, which made the movement public and which Peirce judged a departure from his own view.
- Experience and Nature · 1925 — Dewey's fullest statement of the naturalistic metaphysics behind his theory of inquiry.