Pragmatism as a Theory of Historical Knowledge: John Dewey on the Nature of Historical Inquiry

Abstract

WITHIN American academic circles pragmatism is passe. Lecture halls that once reverberated with words such as experimentalism and experience} are now filled with essence and existence. Perhaps we are all the wiser for it, because no one would want to hear the same words forever, not even essence and existence. Historians, however, have a duty to treat the past with an understanding that tries to be more profound than fashionable, and when American historians speak of pragmatism they should not overlook the fact that they are at once referring to the only major American contribution to Western thought and to a philosophy that has informed the spirit and presuppositions of modern American historiography. The late R. G. Collingwood melodramatically accused empiricists of participating in a conspiracy of silence where the problem of historical knowledge is concerned; no such accusation could be made against the pragmatists. Also, both George Herbert Mead and John Dewey were historians of a sort and even the highly abstract Charles S. Peirce was concerned with the historical or social fixation of belief and habit. It may be argued, as does the author of this essay in a forthcoming study of Carl Becker, that pragmatism is indeed the philosophy of some of the key American historians in the first half of the twentieth century. If this be so, the reflections on historical method of John Dewey, the cardinal pragmatist of our century, clearly assume a wider significance than their intrinsic quality might suggest. We sorely need, at this moment in the history of pragmatism, a study of how Dewey actually wrote about the history of philosophy, as