In 1906, William James borrowed a now-famous analogy for pragmatism from the Italian pragmatist Giovanni Papini:

According to one account, the pragmatist hotel was wildly popular when it first opened its doors, but over the years its luster faded, travelers began to patronize newer, trendier establishments, and eventually only a few drab rooms remained occupied … until Richard Rorty replaced the furniture and carpets and applied fresh paint – renovations that some considered gaudyFootnote ² but that nonetheless attracted new travelers to pragmatism’s chambers.

Whether or not this “eclipse narrative”Footnote ³ is accurate – that is, whether or not pragmatism really was eclipsed for decades by analytic philosophy, among other movements, until Rorty dispelled the darkness – Papini’s analogy remains apt. Even in its earliest days, there was no philosophical doctrine of pragmatism that the movement’s founders shared, and now, on the eve of the 150th anniversary of the tradition’s beginning, an even greater variety of forms of pragmatism are on offer.Footnote ⁴ A different analogy is even more appropriate today: pragmatism is like a sprawling mixed-use development, constructed over several phases, and consisting of hotels, office buildings, private residences, places of worship, and so on. In an old but lively quarter of the development, scholars work toward greater understanding of the ideas of James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, and other founding figures. Nearby, other philosophers are employing the founders’ ideas for new purposes, extending them in new directions and to topics emerging from across the entire range of philosophical endeavor and interest, from religious philosophy to ethics, from aesthetics to political philosophy, from epistemology to metaphysics – while down other streets epistemology and metaphysics are disavowed entirely. Up the block, still other thinkers are finding or forging connections between paradigmatic pragmatist philosophy or philosophers and ideas or figures from other traditions, such as early analytic philosophy, classical feminist philosophy, and the Black intellectual tradition. From one part of the development to another, attitudes toward a given topic can vary wildly, for example, on this cul-de-sac is a community that embraces Peirce’s pioneering work in semiotics, while a few streets away there are skeptics who question the very use of semantic concepts. At various points throughout the neighborhood there reside instrumentalists, naturalists, neo-pragmatists (not to be confused with “new pragmatists”), prophetic pragmatists, clinical pragmatists, environmental pragmatists, feminist pragmatists, and so on.

To search among this bewildering variety of concepts, doctrines, and methods for a single idea that would count as essential to all forms of pragmatism or that would qualify a given philosopher as a genuine pragmatist would be a fool’s errand. A better approach is, as Susan Haack (Reference Haack2006: 58) recommends, “to ask … what we can borrow from the riches of the … pragmatist tradition.” The present volume demonstrates that those riches are numerous and that the purposes for which we might borrow them are many. It illustrates the continuing relevance of pragmatism by applying its multifarious ideas and methods to topics within epistemology, political philosophy, applied ethics, metaphysics, social philosophy, and metaphilosophy.

The volume opens with Chiara Ambrosio’s “Pragmatism and the Imagination” (Chapter 1). Ambrosio reads Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, which Peirce first put forward as a rule for clarifying the meanings of ideas, as inviting us to conduct experiments with our imaginations. On her account, the images that Peirce used to prompt his audience into such imaginative inquiry – figures of dots in 1878’s “How to make our ideas clear” and a picture of a winding line (or is it a stone wall?) in his 1903 Harvard Lectures – are tools that elicit imaginative activity. But since they are external and public, they also constrain that activity, resulting in shared habits that are subject to social criticism and thus to change. Ambrosio turns next to Dewey’s characterization of deliberation as “dramatic rehearsal” in the imagination of different possible courses of action. While she notes that Dewey’s approach to the imagination adds a moral dimension missing from Peirce’s, she sees the two pragmatists as united in the view that experimental imaginative activities are empirical and social with important material components. She also engages with contemporary work on the imagination, suggesting that contributors to recent debates on that topic would benefit from studying Peirce and Dewey.

Anna Boncompagni’s contribution, “Pragmatism and Conceptual Change: From Engineering to Care” (Chapter 2), proposes an alternative to the currently fashionable concern with conceptual engineering and focuses not on the deliberate alteration of concepts but instead on how concepts evolve in response to and along with social changes. She begins with an examination of the ways in which Peirce, James, and Dewey understood conceptual change, and she derives from that examination an understanding of concepts, not as representations, but as “evolving inferential tools.” This understanding, she argues, enables conceptual engineers to avoid the “Strawsonian challenge,” according to which altering the extension and intension of a concept does not change the concept so much as it changes the subject altogether. But she also argues that the project of conceptual engineering faces what she calls “Lenin’s problem”: the danger that in attempting to alter a concept, even well-intentioned engineers are ultimately trying to change the “consciousness of the marginalized.” Inspired by Jane Addams’s idea of sympathetic knowledge, Boncompagni presents an alternative to conceptual engineering that she calls conceptual care: the development of tools to assist the growth of new and emerging concepts in marginalized communities.

Like most other philosophers, pragmatists have typically been more concerned with positive epistemic states (knowledge, warranted assertibility, etc.) than with the negative state of ignorance. But in the present volume’s third chapter, “Pragmatism and Ignorance” (Chapter 3), Richard Kenneth Atkins looks both to Peirce and to C. I. Lewis in order to gain new insights into ignorance itself, into the conditions that keep us ignorant, and into the ways in which ignorance can be valuable. Atkins draws on Peirce’s account of our doxastic machinery – including how beliefs are formed and the various ways they become “fixed” – to formulate lessons about the kinds of information environments that can keep believers “mired in ignorance” and the virtues we should cultivate in order not to succumb to the forces that would keep us ignorant. Making use of Peirce’s and Lewis’s ideas about the good and the right, Atkins also maintains that ignorance is sometimes preferable to knowledge – in some circumstances, ignorance is instrumentally good and the right thing to do is to see that it be maintained.

In Chapter 4, “Pragmatism, Religious Fundamentalism, and the Shadow of a Dead God,” Cornelis de Waal examines Christian fundamentalism in particular and considers both it and pragmatism as competing responses to what Nietzsche called “the death of God”: the demise of the concept of God that was central to both science and philosophy in the modern era. de Waal provides a general account of the relation among religion, science, and philosophy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, an account that culminates in the demise of the idea of God as an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator and in science inheriting the social prestige that was once religion’s. Pragmatism and fundamentalism responded to this situation in very different ways. While not rejecting science itself, the fundamentalists, inspired by Scottish common-sensism, maintained that the only good science is that which is consistent with Scripture – unlike, for example, the theory of evolution. Pragmatists responded differently: they embraced the new science and responded to it with a passel of new philosophical ideas, for example, Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, conceived as a test of meaningfulness for our concepts, be they scientific, metaphysical, or theological; his critical common-sensism, which allows us to take a critical position with regard to our common-sense beliefs; James’s denial of a ready-made world and his doctrine that it is sometimes permissible to believe in the absence of evidence; and fallibilism, which denies the possibility of certainty. None of these pragmatist ideas rule out belief in God, but they do preclude the sort of theism to which fundamentalists are committed.

Chapters 5 and 6 address authoritarianism, albeit in very different ways. Andrew Howat’s concern in “Pragmatism, Truth, and Authoritarianism” is the question whether appeals to truth ought to play a role in political discourse. Pragmatists have been far from univocal on the topic of truth, and very different pragmatist approaches to the issue are at play here. Howat examines two camps: that of Rorty and his followers, and that of Cheryl Misak, Robert Talisse, and other “New Pragmatists.” Rorty famously rejected the idea of objective truth because it is oppressive, and he hailed as “anti-authoritarian” the sort of pragmatism that sets that concept aside. Howat notes some overlap between Rorty’s position and that of Hannah Arendt, who did not reject the idea of truth itself but nonetheless argued against the use of that idea in political contexts. Unlike Rorty or Arendt, the New Pragmatists hold that the principal goal of political discourse is not simply to reach agreement but to achieve a view that can withstand critical scrutiny – and according to New Pragmatism’s concept of truth, such a view can qualify as true. While tentatively aligning himself with the New Pragmatists and against Rorty, Howat argues that not all political discourse has truth as its aim. He also argues that it is unclear whether the New Pragmatist account of democracy, truth, and political discourse has the resources to deal adequately with the ways in which “our bounded rationality” allows us to be exploited by propaganda, misinformation, and other epistemic pollutants of our post-truth environment. He concludes that there is as of yet no clear evidence that pragmatism itself is necessarily anti-authoritarian.

Matthew Festenstein’s chapter, “Pragmatism and Authoritarian Populism,” takes a different tac. After explaining what authoritarian populism amounts to, Festenstein considers Rorty’s critical response to it, a response that some of Rorty’s critics have found to be “insufficiently objectivist about norms and values.” One of those critics is Misak, according to whom the very concept of inquiry – at least as that concept is understood by pragmatists – implies a commitment to an inclusive form of liberal democracy and thus a rejection of authoritarianism. But according to Festenstein, that epistemic defense of democracy is insufficient to guarantee the sort of epistemic inclusiveness that is required by a genuinely democratic society. On his view, pragmatist epistemic defenses of democracy should be augmented with ideas from Dewey’s political philosophy. The Deweyan position that Festenstein develops does not include a defense of democracy intended to be convincing to all epistemic agents; it agrees with Rorty that no decisive argument – no proof – exists to show that some specific way of arranging society is the best. Rather, Festenstein draws from Dewey’s diagnosis of the pathologies of democracy an analysis of authoritarian populism as a distorted form of what Dewey described as the “search for the public.” In that analysis, authoritarian populism is seen as a response to the genuine ills of disempowerment and social atomization, but it is a failed response in that it reinstitutes those ills in the solution it imposes. Dewey’s diagnosis also affords us an understanding of the social causes and effects of antidemocratic epistemic exclusion. Festenstein concludes that Dewey’s ideas enable a better understanding of and response to authoritarian populism than those made possible by narrowly epistemic arguments alone.

Authoritarianism steps out of the foreground but does not leave the stage entirely in Shannon Dea’s contribution, “Pragmatism and Academic Freedom: The University as Intellectual Experiment Station from Humboldt to Peirce and Dewey” (Chapter 7). Dea’s concern is the development and evolution of the idea of academic freedom, and in particular Peirce’s and Dewey’s thinking about the purpose of universities and what’s required to support that purpose. She begins her account in the early nineteenth century, with the founding of the University of Berlin by Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was an influence, at least indirectly, on Peirce and Dewey alike. Humboldt envisioned the university as an institution committed to research, to the intertwining of research and teaching, and to academic freedom – freedom to teach and learn, and freedom from outside interference with the pursuit of truth. Peirce admired the German universities that were informed by Humboldt’s vision and held that the purpose of a university is “the production of knowledge” and that university students should learn not by listening to lectures but by participating in research. Dea connects these ideas with Peirce’s “first … rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think” (EP2: 48, 1898), as well as with his insistence that genuine research not be concerned with “vital” topics. For Dewey, the function of a university is to seek the truth, and any restriction on academic freedom is thus an attack on the university itself. He held that the primary threat to academic freedom is not threats from outside of academia but instead the tendency of universities to expand in various ways and the consequences of that expansion – not only the centralization of administration and the need for greater and greater funding, but also faculty assuming administrative responsibilities and becoming more specialized in their research. Much of this chapter is historical, but its relevance to present concerns is evident. Dea concludes by considering the threat that authoritarianism continues to pose to academic freedom and the resources that Peirce and Dewey provide to help us respond to that threat.

Other kinds of governmental force, namely, policing and criminal punishment, are the focus of Raff Donelson’s “Pragmatism and Punishment” (Chapter 8). Focusing predominantly on criminal justice in the United States, Donelson argues that pragmatism is a valuable tool in our thinking about three issues surrounding punishment. The first issue has to do with how punishment should be defined. He argues against what he calls a representationalist approach and in favor of a pragmatist approach, one that seeks to understand punishment, not in terms of some essence shared by all possible instances of punishment, but instead based on practical criteria, for example, ensuring that the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is interpreted in a just fashion. The second issue concerns ongoing debates about policing and prisons. According to Donelson, pragmatism, and in particular James’s pragmatic method, can help reframe those debates. He describes the respective positions of reformers and abolitionists and suggests, from a Jamesian deflationary perspective, that the reform-versus-abolitionist debate should be approached as a metalinguistic one, a debate over how we should think and speak about policing and imprisonment. The third issue is how best to understand ‘mass’ incarceration. Donelson’s view is that the concept of mass incarceration is a normative one and that the natural facts alone cannot settle the question what levels of incarceration count as mass and what levels count as unproblematic. On his pragmatist approach, we cannot even understand whether a given level counts as mass incarceration without assuming some normative criterion.

The next few chapters are also concerned with pressing social issues. Henrik Rydenfelt begins “Pragmatism and the Environment” (Chapter 9) by considering how some classical pragmatists approached the question of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment. With that background in place, Rydenfelt proceeds to argue that pragmatism provides a unique perspective on questions within contemporary environmental philosophy and ethics. Influenced by idealism but rejecting its invidious distinction between humans and nonhumans, appropriating the worldview of post-Darwinian science but refusing to see philosophy as just another one of the special sciences, pragmatism makes room for a distinct approach to philosophical questions about the environment. One of the most important of those questions is that of the value of nature, and environmental pragmatism understands the pursuit of such normative questions as empirical and experimental, thus attempting to connect normative theory with social practice. Still, it offers no quick and easy solutions but instead recognizes that the pursuit of philosophical questions about nature, like philosophical inquiry generally, and like scientific inquiry even more generally, is a long-term endeavor.

My own contribution, “Pragmatism and Reproductive Bioethics: A Peircean Framework for Considering the Prenatal Human” (Chapter 10), begins with an overview of a flurry of contributions that pragmatists were making to the field of bioethics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Some of that work drew on the thought of classical pragmatists, but little of it was influenced in any substantive way by Peirce. As I try to show, Peirce’s philosophy can make important contributions to contemporary debates about the metaphysical and moral status of prenatal humans. On one side of these debates are those who view an early embryo as numerically identical to the adult to which it gives rise and as having the same moral status as that adult; bioethicists in this camp tend to maintain that our metaphysical and moral judgments about prenatal humans are capable of objective truth. On the other side are those who argue from the continuity of prenatal development to the view that metaphysical judgments about when beings like us begin to exist and moral judgments about when beings like us attain moral status cannot be objective. I argue that Peirce provides the resources for developing alternative positions. Those resources are his synechism, according to which continuity is of central importance in philosophy, his scholastic realism, according to which there are real “generals,” including real kinds, his basic realism, according to which there is a world that is the way it is apart from how anyone represents it to be, and his pragmatic clarifications of the concepts of reality and truth. These ideas can undergird a view of prenatal development that acknowledges its continuity while still maintaining that metaphysical and moral beliefs about prenatal humans are capable of truth – understood in a distinctively Peircean pragmatic way.

Catherine Legg takes a Peircean realist perspective on a very different kind of issue: generative artificial intelligence (genAI). In “Peirce and Generative AI” (Chapter 11), Legg draws on Peirce’s semiotics to help explain the semantic limitations of genAI software like ChatGPT. Early AI developers were stymied by the Cartesian assumption that meanings are discrete, abstract, and internal and by an approach that calcified the meanings of signs, disallowing the growth of meaning. Legg describes some of the progress on AI that has been made in recent years but also some of the remaining weaknesses, which stem, she argues, from a failure to understand, as Peirce did, that semiosis occurs in three fundamentally different ways. Those ways differ in how a given sign represents its object: by convention (symbols), by an unmediated existential relation (indices), or by structural resemblance (icons). Legg argues that despite the complex and fine-grained semantic relations instantiated by contemporary genAI systems, those systems never go beyond symbolicity to instantiate indexical signs, which are required to point to the world external to those systems, and they are not sufficiently constrained by iconic signs, especially those that would bring logical structure. Legg’s Peircean realism comes to the fore when she considers claims made by supporters of genAI that it will enable new achievements with regard to knowledge and truth and claims made by its detractors that it will further erode our collective grasp on truth. Rejecting representationalist realism and drawing on what Gili and Maddalena (Reference Gili and Maddalena2022) call Peirce’s “rich, relational realism” and on Peirce’s view of inquiry as essentially social, Legg explains how we can reconceive reality, truth, and knowledge so as to avoid mistaking the texts created by genAI for genuine knowledge.

Chapter 12, by Jacoby Adeshei Carter, considers the use – and perhaps the misuse – that some contemporary pragmatists have made of “the body of belles-lettres, polemical essays, pamphlets, speeches, books, slave narratives, poetry, articles, fiction, and sermons that articulate the experiences in the Americas of African-descendant peoples.” In “Pragmatism and the Black Intellectual Tradition,” Carter distinguishes among several subtly different ideas – some of which have been stated explicitly, others of which have only been implicitly assumed – about the relationship between that tradition and pragmatism, for example, that elements of the tradition shed light on the works of classical pragmatists, that the tradition complements classical pragmatism in some ways, and that classical pragmatist ideas can be used to correct aspects of the black intellectual tradition. Carter considers the various ways in which scholars have maintained that there is a substantive connection between that tradition and pragmatism, from simply assuming without argument that there is such a connection, to arguing from the fact that a black philosopher (e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois) was taught by a pragmatist (e.g., William James) to the conclusion that the black philosopher’s work should be regarded as pragmatist in nature, to showing that some of the ideas of a given black philosopher (e.g., Alain Locke) are similar to or even merely compatible with some of the ideas of a classical pragmatist (e.g., John Dewey). Carter also casts a critical eye on the assumption that works constituting the black intellectual tradition are not themselves genuine philosophy but only materials to be appropriated as the subject of the real philosophical work of thinkers outside of that tradition. His ultimate goal is to clarify the recent trend in pragmatist scholarship of reconciling classical pragmatism with the black intellectual tradition, and he does so by providing a better understanding of the philosophical assumptions that underlie that trend.

In “Pragmatism, Feminism, Gender, and Identities” (Chapter 13), Núria Sara Miras Boronat considers the work of several feminist thinkers from the progressive era, thinkers who over the last few decades have been incorporated into the history of pragmatism and who are now regarded as feminist pragmatists. Miras Boronat’s central concern is to show that some of those classical feminist pragmatists already had the resources to deal in interesting and valuable ways with two issues that are still relevant today: the distinction between sex and gender, and intersectionality. She argues that decades before either Simone de Beauvoir or Robert J. Stoller turned their attention to it, the sex/gender distinction was being applied to the so-called woman question by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and by Jessie Taft. Gilman’s critique of androcentrism relied on a distinction between the biological and the cultural, while Taft, a student of George Herbert Mead, approached the matter from the point of view of Mead’s social behaviorism and understood gender in terms of social roles and expectations. Miras Boronat notes that, although the word “intersectionality” was coined only in the 1990s, the idea has a much longer history. She considers the contributions to that history of the classical feminist pragmatist Anna Julia Cooper, who wrote about the “double invisibility” of Black women at the beginning of the progressive era but who also managed to reconceive the weakness of that invisibility as a strength. Miras Boronat also describes the much more recent work of Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, who, inspired by Cooper, have developed an analytical approach to intersectionality; on that approach, the idea of intersectionality can help us understand the experience of those who are subject to both racism and sexism, as well as serve as a tool of empowerment for those people and their communities.

The penultimate chapter also addresses gender and social justice, but from the perspective of contemporary pragmatism. Robert Kraut begins “Pragmatism, Ontology, Social Justice” (Chapter 14) with a list of fourteen “themes” that have been associated with pragmatism throughout its history. The theme that is most relevant to Kraut’s project is the “rejection of the idea that normativities sustained within social practice depend upon metaphysical facts.” He describes the pragmatist tendency to understand humanity and our place in the world in terms of inferential connections and social practices rather than in terms of correspondence relations between our words and thoughts and the human-independent facts that those words and thoughts purport to represent. That tendency leads to the view that the various sorts of normativity that are related to our social practices, and by which those practices are appropriately judged to be legitimate or illegitimate, just or unjust, fair or unfair, do not depend on human-independent facts. Kraut argues that if this is correct, then some recent work in social ontology is mistaken, namely, work that assumes that the difference between natural kinds and socially constructed kinds is relevant to questions of social justice. In emphasizing that such kinds are indeed constructed, social constructionists hope to ameliorate the conditions of those who have historically faced injustice and oppression. That goal is obviously laudable, but Kraut argues that the ontology of social construction offers no aid in achieving it. The question of the ontological status of human kinds, and in particular the question whether kinds like gender are socially constructed, turns out to be “politically inert” and to have no bearing on normative questions, including questions of the just treatment of women.

The final chapter consists of Cheryl Misak’s reflections on “The Future of Pragmatism” (Chapter 15). Misak begins by looking backwards and arguing that, contra the narrative I mentioned at the outset, pragmatism was never “eclipsed” and that since Bertrand Russell’s and G. E. Moore’s attacks on James’s account of truth it has always had periods of greater and of lesser respectability. She describes how the version of pragmatism that began with Peirce and that continued with Frank Ramsey and C. I. Lewis “was always a vital part of analytic philosophy,” including throughout the period of the alleged eclipse… although it sometimes went by names other than “pragmatism.” After Rorty’s appropriation – or, depending on whom you ask, his misappropriation – of some of James’s and Dewey’s ideas, pragmatism began to ramify in ways some of which were inspired by the relatively moderate Jamesian/Rortian idea that, as Misak puts it, “there is no getting away from the human when it comes to truth or any other concept of ours.” Setting aside questions about representational relations between words and things, the new pragmatists sought to understand the concepts of meaning, truth, knowledge, and so on in terms of human agency and human practices. In the years since, even newer pragmatists have brought this sensibility to bear on an increasingly wide range of philosophical issues and in disciplines other than philosophy, including law, medicine, and international relations. Recent years have also seen a proliferation of excellent scholarly work on the classical pragmatists and of work that excavates “the buried contribution of early women pragmatists” like Victoria Lady Welby and Margaret Macdonald. Misak concludes that the future of pragmatism is very bright – and it is my hope that the present volume testifies to the accuracy of that conclusion.