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I REGRET THAT GILES GUNN FOUND MY REVIEW OF HIS BOOK SNOBBISH and dismissive. I do not, however, believe my review constitutes a "screed." A mixed review, no doubt. But I thought I made it clear that Gunn's book is not (roughly) half bad. Gunn charges me with "hair-splitting" in my efforts to reserve the term "pragmatism" for a set of arguments about more or less epistemological questions of knowledge, meaning, and truth. But I think it is important to insist on this narrow definition, at least to begin with, since it alerts us to the sometimes dramatic differences-in metaphysics, ethics, politics, and so forth-between those who share what can convincingly be termed a common "pragmatism" in this limited sense. And it enables us to recognize that the various elements in a thinker's philosophy do not necessarily entail, or even cohere with, one another. For example, there is not a whole lot that Peirce, James, and Dewey all shared apart from their pragmatism, and at least some students of James's thought contend (with James himself) that his pragmatism and his radical empiricism could be adopted independently of one another. But I agree that we need some term to hold together in a contentious family such thinkers as Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, Hook, Smith, McDermott, Rorty, Putnam, Bernstein, West, and others Gunn and I might both name. And I admit it is an uphill battle to try to establish an alternative to "pragmatists." But I would like to avoid the |
