Abstract

"Pragmatism" sometimes refers to a prescriptive recommendation to "be pragmatic", and explicates how to do so. By contrast, this dissertation utilizes and defends a descriptive conception of pragmatism. This pragmatism consists of an account of belief, reason, justification, inquiry, meaning, and truth which applies to all people at all times. ;Peirce defined "truth" as "what will be believed at the end of inquiry", but pragmatism today argues that inquiry is forever: we will always be able to weave concepts together in new ways. These re-weavings also alter the concepts themselves, creating ever more modifications and subtlties in the concepts available for the next re-weaving. ;While this "anti-convergence" model of inquiry seems benign, many thinkers in the area of philosophy of law have had a difficult time consistently holding to it. My thesis is that the anti-convergence model does give us an accurate and useful picture of how the law develops, a picture at odds with the account of law offerred by many significant jurisprudential theorists. ;The first two chapters define the pragmatist views on truth, inquiry, belief, skepticism, relativism, solidarity, and argue against drawing specific political implications from these general accounts. ;The third chapter, "Critiques of Other Pragmatists", discusses John Dewey, Benjamin Cardozo, Robert Summers, and Thomas Grey. ;The fourth chapter, "Critique of Ronald Dworkin", argues for an interpretation of Dworkin which puts him in the anti-pragmatist camp. The arguments of the first two chapters, then, are arguments against the tenability of Dworkin's legal philosophy. ;The fifth chapter, "Critique of Stanley Fish", argues that Fish's view of judges as merely "doing what comes naturally" misses the mark insofar as he distinguishes a first stage of "natural" doing from a second act of inventing a rhetoric to make the "natural" judgment palatable to the legal community. In this way Fish ultimately maintains an allegiance to a "nature vs. rhetoric" distinction. ;Unlike Fish, I say judges reason in a way which is not committed in advance to any particular outcome; unlike Dworkin, I say judicial reasoning does not contribute to law's purification