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This paper builds on Robert Talisse’s interpretation of a “crisis” in mid-century pragmatism to examine the overlooked contributions of Charles Morris and Morton White. Against the metaphilosophical overreach of Deweyan pragmatism, Morris and White advanced a distinct effort toward philosophical synthesis: unifying diverse traditions on a pragmatist basis while rejecting doctrinal reductionism or triumphalism along with any hierarchy of vocabularies. This pluralistic ethos, grounded in the socio-cultural embeddedness of science and the centrality of practice, counters both the insularity of forms of inquiry and the separation between categories of meaning, shaping a holistic approach to philosophical engagement. By challenging dualisms at the philosophical and metaphilosophical levels, Morris and White’s approach widens the scope of pragmatism while fostering a freer yet also more rigorous relationship with their intellectual lineage. By challenging the “eclipse” narrative, this paper highlights continuities within the pragmatist tradition, positioning Morris and White as early representatives of a neopragmatist current, with significant resonances in contemporary trends following its “revival” in the 1980s.

This paper defends a Peircean account truth in politics and ethics. It also sets out a novel epistemic conception of democracy. Roughly, if we are to aim at truth, we must take into account all the relevant experience and sustain the conditions under which prevailing arrangements may be contested, an idea which is aligned with democratic politics. Along the way, it identifies a mistake inspired by Dewey and one by Peirce and shows how these mistakes are manifest in contemporary political philosophy.

Pragmatic Reason: Christopher Hookway and the American Philosophical Tradition , edited by Robert B. Talisse, Paniel Reyes Cárdenas, and Daniel Herbert, is the eighth title in the Routledge Studies in American Philosophy book series. According to the contributors, Hookway’s oeuvre has offered, first and foremost, a foundational interpretation and invaluable framework for the study of Charles Sanders Peirce, his philosophy of science, and pragmatist epistemology. For the explicit purposes of this review essay, therefore, I follow a single inquiry road through the intellectual landscape of this edited volume: To what extent, and in what ways, is a pragmatic model of scientific methods characterized by its temporalities ? And how is temporality necessary and significant for the methods of the sciences, their utility, and value? The road of inquiry , to apply the metaphor first introduced by Peirce and further utilized by Hookway, I model across five modes: affect , belief , community , doubt , and hope . The various chapters of this edited volume each more or less center around one of these modes. Ultimately, as I infer here, the inquiry of Peirce, as interpreted by Hook-way, and illustrated by Talisse, Cárdenas, Herbert, and the contributors to their volume, affords for the unifying modelling of our scientific methodologies based upon neither stages nor phases of linear time but modes of lived temporality. In this way, this model is therefore both pragmatically realist and radically psychological.

Cheryl Misak has presented an argument for democracy based on her analysis of the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce: If we care about the truth of our beliefs—as everyone does, according to Misak—then we ought to support democratic norms and democratic political institutions. We argue in the present paper that Misak’s argument does not adequately justify a democratic political system. Her argument does, however, justify a rational commitment to the standard liberal-democratic values of freedom of expression, freedom of association, and the like. We demonstrate as well that Misak’s argument for the democratic values withstands well-known objections against her argument for a democratic political system. We also show that weaker premises involving every agent’s commitment to pursuing their own subjective ends can get us to Misak’s conclusions regarding liberal values. These weaker premises avoid objections raised against Misak’s Peircean view and are acceptable even to those who reject Misak’s idea, taken from her reading of Peirce, that truth is a constitutive norm of belief.

Over the last decade, Robert Talisse has developed a devastating argument against reviving John Dewey's democratic ideal. In his book, A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy, and in other essays, Talisse has argued that Deweyan democracy fails to accommodate Rawls' conception of “the fact of reasonable pluralism” because it is committed to a perfectionist conception of the good. In response, this article offers a Rawlsian rebuttal to Talisse by drawing on Rawls' own characterisation of perfectionism to show that Dewey's conception of the good is not perfectionist on Rawls' account and thus can reasonably accommodate the fact of reasonable pluralism. This article thus begins by exposing and explaining Talisse's argument, before articulating Shane Ralston's rejection of the Berlinian and Rawlsian filters presupposed by Talisse's argument. Then, it develops its central argument by showing that, even if we accept the Rawlsian filter, Deweyan democracy does not fail to accommodate the fact of reasonable pluralism, because it only relies on a thin (not a full) theory of the good, before considering some foreseeable Talissean objections. Ultimately, the article concludes by showing that these objections fail because Deweyan democracy does not rely on a ‘full’ theory of the good.

This review essay critically discusses Robert Talisse’s account of democracy and polarization. I argue that Talisse overstates the degree to which polarization arises from the good-faith practice of democratic citizenship and downplays the extent to which polarization is caused by elites and exacerbated by social structures; this leads Talisse to overlook structural approaches to managing polarization and leaves his account of how citizens should respond to polarization incomplete. I conclude that Talisse’s insights should nevertheless be integrated into a broader agenda for thinking about the causes and solutions to polarization.

In recent years, philosophers influenced by Peirce's pragmatism have contributed to the democracy debate by offering not simply a justification of democracy that relies on epistemic as well as moral presumptions, but a justification on purely epistemic grounds, that is, without recourse to any moral values or principles. In a nutshell, this pragmatist epistemic argument takes as its starting-point (1) a few fundamental epistemic principles we cannot reasonably deny, and goes on to claim that (2) a number of interpersonal epistemic commitments follow, which in turn (3) justify democracy in a full-fledged, deliberative sense. In light of the fact of reasonable pluralism, this freestanding (nonmoral) epistemic justification of democracy is allegedly superior to the mainstream, morally anchored liberal alternatives, because epistemic principles are universally shared despite moral disagreement. The pragmatist epistemic approach has been praised for being a valuable contribution to democratic theory, but few attempts have so far been made to systematically scrutinize the argument as a whole. The present paper sets out to do that. In particular, our investigation focuses on the underappreciated but central coherence form of the pragmatist epistemic argument: the central claim that in order to be an internally coherent believer, one must accept democracy. While we endorse the fundamental premise (1) for the sake of argument, our analysis shows that the argument fails in both of the two further steps, (2) and (3). More specifically, the epistemic principles are too weak to entail the suggested interpersonal epistemic commitments; and even if these epistemic commitments are granted, they are insufficient to ground democracy.

This essay argues that to understand Dewey's vision of democracy as \"epistemic\" requires consideration of how experiential and communal aspects of inquiry together produce what is named here \"pragmatic objectivity.\" Such pragmatic objectivity provides an alternative to absolutism and self-interested relativism by appealing to certain norms of empirical experimentation. Pragmatic objectivity, it is then argued, can be justified by appeal to Dewey's conception of primary experience. This justification, however, is not without its own complications, which are highlighted with objections regarding \"radical pluralism\" in political life, and some logical problems that arise due to the supposedly \"ineffable\" nature of primary experience. The essay concludes by admitting that while Dewey's theory of democracy based on experience cannot answer all of the objections argumentatively, it nevertheless provides potent suggestions for how consensus building can proceed without such philosophical arguments.

This article engages the recent work of Robert Talisse,A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy, particularly his concern that Deweyan democracy is unable to accommodate pluralism. I contend that Talisse's claim is based on a mischaracterization of John Dewey's understanding of democracy—a misreading, I maintain, that largely results from the connection Talisse draws between Dewey and the early work of Michael Sandel. The article lays out more stridently the way in which democracy and pluralism are constitutively connected in Dewey's writings.

This comment addresses itself to a central feature of Robert Talisse'sA Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy(Routledge, 2008). In particular, I raise an objection to three claims: that the search for true beliefs requires extensive epistemic testing, that this requires a democratic social order, and that these first two claims are themselves a philosophically neutral articulation of every reasonable believer's epistemic practices. I suggest some implications of this doubt for the conception of liberalism Talisse promotes in this book.