ABSTRACT
Pragmatism's appeal lies arguably in its brass-tacks approach to philosophy. The pragmatist holds that philosophical questions are elliptical for problems in experience; they are practical challenges made theoretical. The pragmatist program reorients philosophical speculation toward our lives and away from idle abstraction, integrating theory with practice. This chapter examines the problems evident in William James's metaphilosophy as articulated in "The Present Dilemma in Philosophy". It shows that Rescher's program not only does not suffer from these problems, but it provides a model for philosophical progress that is not itself beholden to exclusively pragmatist dogma. Pragmatists wrongly resist the skeptical tradition, holding the radical skeptic in contempt as a manifestation of the spirit of total impracticality. It should be no surprise that pragmatism is methodologically consistent with a form of mitigated skepticism. Pragmatism's first rule is that one should never block the road of inquiry. Skepticism, properly deployed, is no block to the road of inquiry.
