The church of pragmatism

Abstract

In his Four ages, John Deely points to Peirce's 1905 Monist article, “What is pragmatism,” as a key text in the history of human intellectual development. It was there that Peirce famously kissed his child (the word “pragmatism”) good-bye and renamed his great contribution to philosophy “pragmaticism,” a word “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.” According to Deely, what Peirce did amounted to “disowning the most famous American development in all of philosophy's history”; and this, Deely says, has been an embarrassment to those Americans who “cherish the idea of a home-grown philosophy.” Deely claims that to attempt to dismiss Peirce's rejection of “pragmatism” as a mere verbal quibble misses the point that what Peirce did was to step from the third great age of philosophy, where pragmatism dwells, into the fourth great age, the proper home for pragmaticism. There is, indeed, something right about this way of looking at things. But in an attempt to draw clear boundaries Deely misrepresents a reality that is fuzzier than the picture he paints. Peirce never meant to separate himself entirely from pragmatism, any more than Martin Luther intended to separate himself entirely from Catholic Christianity. Peirce only wanted to stake out a more genuine doctrine, a more precise one, free from some of the errors the popular pragmatists had fallen into. Peirce's separation from the other pragmatists was more like a schism within a church than a paradigm shift: Peirce remained a pragmatist, of sorts, to the end. But the errors he sought to expose and avoid were rooted in the precepts of the Third Age and Peirce's way forward, as Deely recognizes, was indeed the Way of Signs.