ABSTRACT
Peter Dudley, in his introduction to the 1995 edition of Kotarbinski's Praxiology, noted that a persistent criticism of praxiology has been its separation from concerns which are external relevant to the assessment of the overall results of inquiry. Pragmatism derives from a superficial assessment based on the name more than any deep understanding, which leads to the tendency to envision pragmatism as an elevation of practical results over historical and ideal considerations, sustained by an inordinate strain of intellectual skepticism. Although pragmatism emphasizes an instrumentalist or consequentialist test of ideas, it is more clearly a theory of meaning than an elevation of practicality or pure methodology. For Oliver Wendell Holmes, law could in some respects be evaluated from the standpoint of efficiency, but not in isolation from its institutional history. His principal endeavor as a young scholar, recently returned from the Civil War, was to understand, and to reinterpret, Anglo-American common law as a process of inquiry.
