New Pragmatists
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loginAs Robert Westbrook, our best intellectual historian of pragmatism,notes, pragmatists have always disagreed amongst themselves about thecontent of the position. Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of thedoctrine,quickly denied paternity of the child James had adopted and announced hewould henceforth refer to his own doctrine as ‘pragmaticism’, a word ‘uglyenough to be safe from kidnappers’. John Dewey, though deeply indebted toJames’s thinking, nonetheless took care to distinguish his own ‘instrumentalism’from what he took to be James’s more tender-minded efforts to use pragmatismto secure religious belief. Peirce,in turn, responded to Dewey’s praise of hisessay on ‘What Pragmatism Is’ (1905) with a puzzled letter noting that Dewey’sinstrumental logic ‘forbids all such researches as those which I have beenabsorbed in for the last eighteen years’. (Westbrook 2005: 1)
