James was always interested in the problem of how our thoughts come to be about the world. Nevertheless, if one takes James to be trying to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a thought's being about an object, counterexamples to his account will be embarrassingly easy to find. James, however, was not aiming for this sort of analysis of intentionality. Rather than trying to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for every case of a thought's being about an object, James focused (...) his analysis on the prototypical/paradigm cases. This analysis of the core could then be supplemented with additional remarks about how the less prototypical cases could be understood in terms of their relations to (and similarities with) the paradigm. It is argued that this type of analysis is psychologically well motivated, and makes James account surprisingly plausible. (shrink)

A plea has been made for replacing the perspective of “symbolic interactionism” with a new interactionist's perspective—“radical interactionism.” Unlike in symbolic interactionism, where Mead's and Blumer's ideas play the most prominent roles, in radical interactionism's, Park's ideas play a more prominent role than either Mead's or Blumer's ideas. On the one hand, according to Mead, the general principle behind the organization of human group life was once dominance, but it is now “sociality.” On the other hand, according to Park, this (...) general principle is now and has always been dominance. Blumer takes a position much closer to Mead's than Park's arguing that the general principle underlying the organization of human group life is sociality. Under certain special conditions, however, it can become dominance. Although like radical interactionism, symbolic interactionism is rooted in pragmatism, unlike in radical interactionism, symbolic interactionism is still plagued with strains of utopian thought, among which the notion of sociality is the most virulent. Sociality may be the principle on which human group life is organized in heaven, but, down here on earth, it remains organized on the basis of domination. Thus, radical interactionism provides a much-needed antidote to the idealistic overtones still found in symbolic interactionism. (shrink)

Argues that truth, moral right, political right, and aesthetic value may be understood as arising out of a naturalist account of humanity, if naturalism is rightly conceived.

This paper suggests that pragmatism makes a distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of radical democracy. It investigates the relation ship between the renewal of interest in pragmatism and the recent attempts to develop radical democratic alternatives to political liberalism. With particular reference to the contemporary critical social theory of Habermas and Honneth, the paper outlines key dimensions of the civic republican, deliberative democratic and reflexive cooperative reconstructions of John Dewey's conception of democracy. These reconstructions are shown to have (...) explicated important pragmatist insights concerning public participation in civic associations, the discursive practices of deliberation, and the cooperative organization of the division of labour. However, it is argued that each of these reconstructions pre suppose some facet of the additional pragmatist understanding of the creativity of action and that the most distinctive contributions of pragmatism to radical democratic theory and practice derive from a notion of democracy as instituted and emergent meaning. (shrink)

George Herbert Mead argues that human society is comprised of six basic institutions—language, family, economics, religion, polity, and science. I do not believe that he can be criticized for making institutions the cornerstones of a society, but he can definitely be criticized for his explanation of how our basic institutions originate, how these institutions operate in society after their inception, and how they later change, modifying society in the process. The problem with Mead's explanation of these three critical matters is (...) that he based them on his principle of “sociality” rather than on the principle of “domination.” If Mead's principle of sociality is replaced by the principle of domination and his notion of the “generalized other” is replaced by the notion of the “phantom community,” then most of these problems can be largely solved. Thus, in this paper, I will not only point out the key problems in Mead's theory of society, but I will also offer solutions to them based on the notions of domination and the “phantom community.” The end product is a “radical interactionism” that surpasses Mead's original interactionism in identifying the part that both domination and the composite “other” play in every known human society—big and small, and past and present. (shrink)

: In 2000, the Romanian journal Paideia published a series of essays to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of John Dewey. Three articles--by Peter Hlebowitsh, then the editor of Education and Culture; Daniel Tanner, then the president of the John Dewey Society; and William Schubert, past president of the JDS-- were prepared and translated into Romanian for publication. Paideia editor Nicolae Sacalis has contributed an article describing Dewey's influence in Romania. In "The Writings of John Dewey in Romania: (...) Policy and Pedagogy," Sacalis describes the interest in pragmatism of the Romanian intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s and how Dewey's writings became important to the government's education leaders and school practitioners. Dewey's popularity was so great that a comprehensive overview of his work was published to honor and acknowledge his eightieth birthday. The writings of Dewey were silenced thereafter but not forgotten. His works reappeared in the 1970s for a new generation of Romanian educators, and since the 1989 revolution, his writings have received even greater popularity, leading to the commemoration of his death by Paideia. (shrink)

Kathleen Wallace’s The Network Self: Relation, Process, and Personal Identity (2019) presents an understanding of personal identity and selfhood. Its central conundrum is how a person or self can be a something that, while being related to and even constituted by many things, including endless experiences and events and social roles, hence subject to continuous change, can nevertheless sustain an identity capable of responsible agency and all the other moral and narrative predicates so crucial to us. In response Wallace creates (...) a Cumulative Network Model of the self, rooted in the relational and social analysis of human individuality characteristic of the American philosophical tradition, that, while processural and complex in the extreme, is nevertheless capable of autonomy and responsibility. Her account provides a novel paradigm for the analysis of human self, but with its very complexity raises questions as to the relation between the referents of “person,” “self,” and “I.”. (shrink)

This dissertation responds to the question, "To what extent can the pragmatist theories of truth of Peirce and James be defended against the major philosophical criticisms that have been used to dismiss them?" The answer to this depends to a great degree on the kind of formulation given these theories. Hence, one of the major goals of this dissertation is to express precisely and systematically Peirce's and James's theories of truth in such a way that only one of various possible (...) alternative expressions is identified as the interpretation that most remains faithful to the intentions of Peirce and James. Rather than offer merely a historical overview of these theories, I attempt a critical reformulation of them in the sense that I intervene to correct errors and aberrations in the theories as promulgated, either on my own responsibility or by reference to authoritative statements. The investigation consists of these parts: a comparison and contrast of Peirce's and James's pragmatic methods, in which it is suggested that James's medical background led him to a theory of meaning rather more broad in principle than Peirce's; an investigation of Peirce's theory of truth, in which his most famous formulation receives detailed exegesis; an investigation of James's theory of truth, in which it is argued that this theory should more properly be understood as a theory of knowledge; and an enumeration and evaluation of those major philosophical criticisms aimed at these theories, in which it is argued that the pragmatist theories have, indeed, been misunderstood, and that when correctly interpreted, they may be defended against these objections. (shrink)