ABSTRACT
Harvard’s most famous professors of pragmatism – William James (1842–1910), Clarence Irving Lewis (1883–1964), Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), and Hilary Putnam (1926–2016) – defended three closely connected theses about knowledge and reality. The first thesis is that traditional empiricism (understood to include positivism) has failed to appreciate the extent to which our worldview is mind-made or shaped by subjectivity. The second thesis is that this first thesis – that our minds do not ‘copy’ reality or relate to things disinterestedly – need not lead to skepticism about knowledge or relativism about truth. The third thesis is that philosophy can avoid skepticism and relativism only by overcoming certain conventional oppositions: between creation and discovery, making and finding, freedom and constraint.
