ABSTRACT

Pragmatism can be thought of narrowly: as a philosophical school of thought centered on evaluating beliefs by their tendency to promote success at the satisfaction of wants, whose paradigmatic practitioners were the classical American triumvirate of Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. But pragmatism can also be thought of more broadly: as a movement centered on the primacy of the practical, initiated already by Kant, whose twentieth-century avatars include not only Peirce, James and Dewey, but also the early Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein and such figures as Quine, Sellars, Davidson and Rorty. I think that the broader version of pragmatism is much more important and interesting than the narrower one. But I also think that an understandable tendency to bring the pragmatist tradition into relief by emphasizing features distinctive of that narrower conception has made it difficult to bring the broader one into focus. In this essay, I want to say something about the relations between the two. I'll start by distinguishing a number of commitments of different sorts that shape pragmatism in the broader sense. I'll then try to say how pragmatism in the narrower sense might be thought to fit into this constellation of ideas. I'll close by arguing against the utility of the model of language (and thought generally) as a kind of tool, which is characteristic of the narrower construal of pragmatism.