ABSTRACT
John Dewey (1859-1952) is the middle figure in the roll-call of pragmatists, commanding the American philosophical scene from a generation after Peirce and James to a generation before the revival known as ‘neopragmatism’. But as a onetime student of Peirce, Dewey saw little prospect for his thought:
It would be another twenty years before Dewey reassessed Peirce’s philosophy and really encountered him for the first time. By then, the ‘generalizations of physical science’ themselves changed in light of Darwin, Heisenberg and Schrödinger and he found in Peirce’s scientifically-oriented pragmatism the ideals of democratic, fallibilistic inquiry to develop further in his own pragmatic epistemology.
