The Tradition of American Pragmatism: The Lay of the Land

This began as a recommendation for Adam of Knowledge Ecology.  I have decided to make a longer, more general  explanation of the lay of the land of John Dewey scholarship.  This is not meant to be comprehensive, although eventually I plan for it to be so.  I am speaking to a number of factors, including sociological and political ones.

There are three sub-traditions of "American pragmatism" that all fall under the umbrella of "American philosophy."  "American philosophy" is meant to include any philosophic though native to the United States, or arguably, the Americas.  It includes many subjects and thinkers, such as John Edwards or Jane Addams.  The reason I mention this is because pragmatism situates itself within its history, e.g., does not strongly distinguish between "doing history" and "doing contemporary," which is an outlook common to continental philosophy but not to stereotypical analytic philosophy.

The three subtraditions of American pragmatism are classical, neoclassical, and neopragmatism.  Classical pragmatism is the study of historic texts of the founding figures and the resultant historical commentaries.  Neoclassical pragmatism, a term coined by Larry Hickman I believe, includes classical pragmatism but aims to continue the historic projects into contemporary philosophy.  In practice, its a fluid distinction, but is useful to mention because some believe that contemporary pragmatists are just historians, which is not true.  Many neoclassicals are also pluralists, myself included, and frequently are scholars of analytic, continental, and Asian philosophy.  A number of well-regarded scholars either do not hold a degree in philosophy or reside in other departments, especially education, politics, and psychology; the field strongly tends towards interdisciplinarity.    Finally, there is neopragmatism, which has several branches inclusive of Quine, Putnam, Davidson, Rorty, West, Haack, etc.  In short, neopragmatists adopt a few theories from classical pragmatism, especially its theory of truth and politics, and apply them to issues in analytic philosophy.  Neoclassicals and neopragmatists share little in common, and there has been a rift for decades that has been the subject of much internal discussion.  Part of the rift is due to the term "pragmatism" becoming publicly associated with whatever neopragmatism does.  Hence, I usually get many shocked looks when explaining my work to analytic philosophers, because what I say is so counter-intuitive to what they think "pragmatism" is.  In conclusion, there are many who identify with pragmatism for whom these labels are not helpful; I am merely identifying the mainstream lines of published scholarship.  Peirceans, for instance, are most likely not to be well-served by these distinctions in my view.

Within neoclassical pragmatism, there are many lines of scholarship.  I will name a few functional divisions.  First, scholarship tends to divide on whether one emphasizes the aesthetic dimension (Alexander et al) or "instrumentalist/theory of inquiry" dimension, which amounts to which texts they emphasize, i.e., Experience and Nature & Art as Experience vs. Logic: the Theory of Inquiry.  Scholarship divides again depending upon one's "pluralism," i.e., whether one is also a scholar of continental, analytic, Asian, or of other non-philosophy fields.  There are strong trends among those who pair pragmatism with continental vs. with analytic.  Pragmatists, recently as a matter of employment necessity, study more than pragmatism.