ABSTRACT
Although Dewey drew from a large number of sources, three were of particular importance to his thinking. All of these stressed development and change as fundamental principles of the world and of existence: Hegel’s philosophy, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and American pragmatism, the latter of which I shall discuss in this chapter. Dewey rarely described his own philosophy as pragmatism, preferring the terms naturalism, experimentalism, or instrumentalism. He is nevertheless often regarded today as one of the great figures in pragmatism, alongside Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), and occasionally the sociologist and social psychologist George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). It can be difficult to pinpoint the precise propositions that are fundamental to pragmatic philosophy as a whole. Historian Louis Menand (2002) asserts that pragmatism is less a set of ideas or assumptions comprising a philosophical school than it is an all-encompassing position or a central idea—namely, an idea about ideas (p. xi). Pragmatism’s central idea is that “ideas are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but are tools—like forks and knives and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves” (p. xi).
