ABSTRACT
Sommentators agree about the impact of pragmatist philosophy on social interactionism, although the exact nature of this impact is hotly disputed. Some critics, mostly outside the interactionist perspective proper, charge interactionism with an astructural, subjectivist, and status-quo bias and blame pragmatism for the fact. Social interactionism was an outgrowth of this ingenious attempt to find in society an anchorage for the determinate world of objective reality. Interactionists accepted the pragmatist thesis that the world is not inherently determinate, that it is open to multiple determinations, which led them to the pioneering view of society as the pluralistic universe continuously produced by the collective efforts of individuals. "Interaction" was more than a technical term in the vocabulary of social interactionism; it was also a philosophical category of wideranging significance. Social interactionism was one of the more openly committed currents in the early twentieth century American sociology.
