ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of some key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. This book is the culmination of the first fifteen years of a continuing collaboration aimed largely at thinking within, and yet occasionally against the longstanding philosophical trajectory known as pragmatism. Some philosophical movements are founded, while others are federated. The British Empiricists, for example, were obviously allied on several central philosophical issues. Yet Locke, Berkeley, and Hume did not see themselves as a philosophical school or movement. According to the neoclassicalists, neo-pragmatism is in the grip of a philosophical Stockholm Syndrome; what is required, therefore, is a recovery of the classical pragmatists, a return to the state of play in philosophy that prevailed in Dewey's heyday. Pragmatism was most definitely founded, and moreover, the founding was self-conscious. Pragmatists often employ terms like fallibilism, meliorism, and experimentalism to describe a philosophical perspective that promises to synthesize the conflicting impulses.
