ABSTRACT
Tonight I want to tell a story. It is a fascinating and complex story filled with colourful characters and a certain amount of drama. And it is our story—that is an American story—but one that is barely known and not fully appreciated. It is the story of the origins of American pragmatism, the history of its vicissitudes, and of its current international resurgence. The word ‘pragmatic’ has become an everyday word—and everyone has a vague idea of what it is supposed to mean. To be pragmatic is to be eminently practical—to know what the ‘real world’ is really like and to adapt to these realities. Sometimes, being pragmatic is contrasted with being ideological—as when we say that some politicians are rigidly ideological and others are far more pragmatic. And sometimes it has a derogatory meaning—a pragmatic person is someone who doesn’t have any firm principles and makes all sorts of practical compromises. I am going to call this the common or ‘vulgar’ sense of pragmatism—and I hope to show you that it has little to do with the great American philosophical tradition of pragmatism initiated by Charles S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey. So when does our story begin? We have one important clue. We know the precise date when the word was introduced to designate a philosophical orientation. On 26 August 1898, William James, who was an immensely popular lecturer, delivered an address before the Philosophical Union of the University of California in Berkeley titled ‘Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results’. This is the way he began:
An occasion like the present would seem to call for an absolutely untechnical discourse. I ought to speak of something connected with life rather than logic. I ought to give a message with a practical outcome and an emotional musical accompaniment, so to speak, fitted to interest men as men, and yet also not altogether to disappoint philosophers—since philosophers, let them be as queer as they will, still are men in the secret recesses of their hearts, even here in Berkeley.2
