John Dewey in Peace and War

Abstract

pragmatism work? To ask the question is to risk going against the American grain. During the first half of the twentieth century the philosophy of pragmatism seemed to be America's national creed. Even today, long after its demise, many scholars remain convinced that the rise of pragmatism not only liberated progressive thought from the deductive chains of nineteenth-century conservative ideology, but even resolved the crisis of authority that confronted an American mind coming to terms with twentieth-century modernity. Joining hands with natural science, pragmatism offered empirical methodology as the answer to epistemological doubt. As process replaced truth, the intellect no longer had to ask unanswerable questions about the perennial riddles and ironies of history and philosophy. Man thinking became man doing, and the challenge was not so much to contemplate life as to it. For experience would demonstrate that the problem of authority could be democratized through education and collective inquiry. Indeed experience demonstrated that a problem without a solution was simply not a problem. American scholars could be confident that pragmatism resolved the problems of life because intellectual historians concentrated on its background and development, while philosophers evaluated its theoretical implications in view of the technical issues in philosophy itself. Few historians or philosophers even such astute critics as Arthur O. Lovejoy, Bertrand Russell, and George Santayana studied pragmatic ideas in light of their consequences in human behavior. It seems strangely ironic that an intellectual historian or a philosopher would accept the theoretical claims of pragmatism without examining its actual operations in the daily world of experience. Such behavior presupposes the very formalism that pragmatism sought to overcome the fallacy of accepting at face value what a thinker says rather than what he does, and of treating the propositions of philosophy as tantamount to their validity. The irony lies in the awkward fact that pragmatism may be refuted not so much by logic as by its own criterion of verification: the experience of history may