ABSTRACT
The previous chapter examined the origins of the neopragmatic revival, showing how the failure of analytical epistemology opens the way for a reconsideration of pragmatic themes. It combats a counter-historicist view that imports classical pragmatists into the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, as a way around the epistemological problems of modernity/postmodernity. This view portrays Peirce, James and Dewey as presciently avoiding this scene, with its ‘losses’ of self, world, text and meaning, without falling into the metaphysical absolutism or cultural relativism typifying other responses. 1
The irony is that this view predicates neopragmatism’s capability in avoiding the context it is supposed to overcome. Neopragmatism thus portrayed, however, is unpragmatic. It nullifies that which makes neopragmatism a viable epistemological option: the contextual, commonsensical and practical it preserves.
