Louis Menand on the origins of pragmatism

Nice presentation last night, Lauren!

If anyone wants to further explore the historical origins of pragmatism as an American philosophy, I recommend starting with Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America.

 

The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, founder of modern jurisprudence; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist and the founder of semiotics. The club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea - an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Holmes, James and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things out there waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent - like knives and forks and microchips - to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals - that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely dependent - like germs - on their human carriers and environment. They also thought that the survival of any idea depends not on its immutability but on its adaptability. g'r

• “…in a universe in which events are uncertain and perception is fallible, knowing cannot be a matter of an individual mind ‘mirroring’ reality. Each mind reflects differently—even the same mind reflects differently at different moments—and in any case reality doesn’t stand still long enough to be accurately mirrored … knowledge must therefore be social.”
• “We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need.”
• “If behaving as though we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.”
• “There is a difference between an idea and ideology.”
• “It was not a matter of choosing sides, it was a matter of rising above the whole concept of sideness.”