This introduction outlines the approach and argument of the book, summarising the content of all chapters. The main claim is that knowing can generally be defined as a correct way of doing. The approach is neopragmatist and anti-representational, building on the philosophies of Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom, with the classical pragmatists – Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey – forming the general background. The book’s most original contribution is methodologism, a position in which knowing and meaning require following the ‘method’ or way that attributes warrant to what is known and meaning to what is meant. The ‘method’ of methodologism refers to the etymological meaning of ‘method’ as a way. This way must be correct, where correctness is determined by the rules of practice in a community. There are two general goals for our ‘methods’: (1) The most fundamental aim is to settle our beliefs, and (2) in the absence of a settlement (or the possibility of achieving a settlement in practice), to guide our conversational practice.

This chapter articulates what methodologism as pragmatism means. A central tenet of this view is that doing is constitutive of both meaning and knowing. Methodologism holds that meaning and knowledge arise from following a method – a procedure oriented towards achieving the desired outcome of fixing beliefs or keeping rational conversation going. This framework applies to all epistemic practices. Moreover, methodologism asserts that what is known is not independent of how it is known, thereby bridging the gap between ontology and practice. This line of thought has important precedents in the work of William James, John Dewey, Thomas Kuhn, and others. Crucially, it is the community of practitioners who determine what counts as correctness or incorrectness. Given the diversity of communal rules and regimes of reasoning, pluralism emerges as a natural consequence. Membership in and choice between communities thus carries normative weight. Discursive rationality allows for comparisons between communities in terms of their rationality. Ultimately, it is not merely useful but an ethical obligation – a societal duty to uphold rational practices as a condition of human flourishing.

This chapter explores the processes and form of the imagined national community in Rwanda in light of global discourses of difference, focusing on the space of identity that the state narrative of unity allows for Twa to navigate their subjectivisation as Rwandans. Our data shows that many Twa buy into the government’s narratives of national unity and ‘Rwandan-ness’. They choose to identify themselves as Rwandan and appear willing to forgo Twa identity for the promise of belonging and progress that they understand national narratives of unity to offer. To understand this as forced assimilation – whether through the violence of law or economic circumstances – is too simple a reading: Twa individuals are actively using the ‘Ndi Umunyarwanda’ programme messaging to create spaces of inclusion for themselves within Rwandan society.

Causes are INUS conditions: Insufficient but Necessary parts of Unnecessary but Sufficient conditions for a contribution to the effect. (This does not imply that INUS conditions are causes: the correlation may be spurious.) ‘Contribution to’ because the effect may have a different overall magnitude because other sets of factors contribute as well. INUS conditions are graphed in epidemiology as sets of ’causal pie’. The other members of such a set are labelled ‘support factors’ (or ‘moderators’) for the cause of focus and include the absence of features that can derail the process. Sometimes, particularly in qualitative comparative analysis, factors are represented as yes–no variables. Other studies allow features to vary in magnitude. A support factor of a given magnitude is represented as part of a set contributing a given magnitude to the effect. For a causal process to occur, a full causal pie must exist at each step.

Before his rehabilitation got under way in the late 1970s, had Emerson really been the object of “repression” by the American philosophical establishment? The validity of the historical claim put forward by Stanley Cavell has always seemed doubtful. In point of fact, Emerson turns out to have, from his day to ours, a largely unbroken chain of legitimate heirs among American philosophers. This chapter, which builds on previous scholarly efforts to correct and complete the record, notably by historians of pragmatism, continues the work of recovering the Emersonian legacy in American philosophy. The multiform nature of that legacy, which extends to pedagogical theory and classroom practice in American schools, raises important questions for historiographers as they deal with changes in cultural and institutional reception over time. Of particular importance is the question raised by Cavell’s own contribution to Emerson studies: what is philosophy’s relation to the broader literary culture?

A hallmark of wise deliberative spaces is their commitment to truth-seeking, in contrast to “post-truth” contexts where emotional appeals and personal beliefs are more important than objective facts. Chapter 5 explores how post-truth thinking has been fueled by cognitive elites across the political spectrum and traces its roots to postmodernist ideas. The chapter reviews philosophical definitions of truth, contrasting idealist and coherentist views with realist theories, specifically correspondence, semantic, and pragmatic approaches. It draws on Hilary Putnam’s concept of natural realism to argue that objective truths do exist – depending on the domain of inquiry – but only if we distinguish between what is true and what is merely believed to be true. Postpositivism supports this by recognizing an external reality while acknowledging that our knowledge is fallible and evolving. Biases, though inevitable, can be countered through reflexive and communal inquiry. Ultimately, the chapter argues that wisdom lies in understanding the nature of different kinds of inquiry – scientific, moral, or otherwise – without falling into the trap of relativism.

Until recently, Wilfrid Sellars’s connection to pragmatism was seen mostly as tangential by analytic pragmatists influenced by him and by anti-analytic ‘classicalist’ pragmatists alike. Recent scholarship in the history of pragmatism, however, has begun to recover him as a genuine member of that tradition. Similarly, John Dewey, whom no one would challenge as a genuine pragmatist, is often seen by classicalists as fundamentally opposed to the kind of analytic philosophy that Sellars represents and by analytic pragmatists as having some good ideas but not very successfully bringing them to fruition. This too is conventional wisdom best overturned. A fresh-eyed interpretation of Dewey’s work shows that Dewey is a major influence on the development of Sellars’s pragmatism, namely that Sellars’s account of conceptual intentionality in nature is both a critical reaction to and development of Dewey’s naturalistic view of conceptual meanings. In particular, Sellars’s account of rule-following behavior and pattern-governed behavior builds upon Dewey’s account of the relationship between conceptual activity in reasoned discourse and intelligent habits of action in ordinary affairs. By illuminating this influence of Dewey on Sellars, we see that Sellars and Dewey are in the same pragmatist tradition of thought about mind in nature. Further, appreciating this influence shows that Sellars’ view departs from an important tenet of Dewey’s pragmatism, and in doing so makes his view vulnerable to an objection that Dewey’s is not.

Rydenfelt begins by considering how some classical pragmatists approached the question of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment. With that background in place, Rydenfelt proceeds to argue that pragmatism provides a unique perspective on questions within contemporary environmental philosophy and ethics. Influenced by idealism but rejecting its invidious distinction between humans and nonhumans, appropriating the worldview of post-Darwinian science but refusing to see philosophy as just another one of the special sciences, pragmatism makes room for a distinct approach to philosophical questions about the environment. One of the most important of those questions is that of the value of nature, and environmental pragmatism understands the pursuit of such normative questions as empirical and experimental, thus attempting to connect normative theory with social practice. Still, it offers no quick and easy solutions but instead recognizes that the pursuit of philosophical questions about nature, like philosophical inquiry generally, and like scientific inquiry even more generally, is a long-term endeavor.

Festenstein begins by considering Richard Rorty’s response to authoritarian populism, a response that some critics have found to be insufficient. For example, Cheryl Misak argues that the concept of inquiry implies a commitment to an inclusive form of liberal democracy and thus a rejection of authoritarianism. But according to Festenstein, that epistemic defense of democracy is insufficient to guarantee the sort of inclusiveness required by a genuinely democratic society. He argues that pragmatist epistemic defenses of democracy should be augmented by John Dewey’s political philosophy, e.g., his diagnosis of the pathologies of democracy an analysis of authoritarian populism as a distorted form of what Dewey described as the “search for the public.” That diagnosis also affords us an understanding of the social causes and effects of anti-democratic epistemic exclusion, and according to Festenstein, Dewey’s ideas enable a better understanding of and response to authoritarian populism than those made possible by narrowly epistemic arguments alone.

Dea’s account of the development of the idea of academic freedom begins with Wilhelm von Humboldt, who envisioned the university as an institution committed to research, to the intertwining of research and teaching, and to academic freedom. Humboldt influenced both Charles Peirce and John Dewey. Peirce held that the purpose of a university is “the production of knowledge” and that university students should learn not by listening to lectures but by participating in research. For Dewey, the function of a university is to seek the truth, and any restriction on academic freedom is an attack on the university itself. He held that the primary threat to academic freedom is the tendency of universities to expand and the consequences of that expansion. Dea concludes by considering the threat that authoritarianism continues to pose to academic freedom and the resources that Peirce and Dewey provide to help us respond to that threat.

Miras Boronat addresses the work of progressive-era feminists who have been incorporated into the history of pragmatism and are now regarded as feminist pragmatists. She argues that some of those figures already had the resources to deal in important ways with two issues still relevant today: the distinction between sex and gender, and intersectionality. Decades before de Beauvoir or Stoller addressed the sex/gender distinction, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jessie Taftwas were applying it to the so-called woman question. Gilman’s critique of androcentrism relied on a distinction between the biological and the cultural, while Taft approached the matter from the point of view of social behaviorism and understood gender in terms of social roles and expectations. On the subject of intersectionality, Miras Boronat describes the work of Anna Julia Cooper, who wrote about the “double invisibility” of Black women at the beginning of the progressive era, and she adresses recent work inspired by Cooper that is aimed at developing an analytical approach to intersectionality.

Boncompagni proposes an alternative to the current concern with conceptual engineering and focuses not on the deliberate alteration of concepts but instead on how concepts evolve in response to and along with social changes. Beginning with an examination of the ways that Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey understood conceptual change, she derives an understanding of concepts as “evolving inferential tools.” This understanding enables conceptual engineers to avoid the “Strawsonian challenge,” according to which altering the extension and intension of a concept does not change the concept so much as it changes the subject altogether. But the project of conceptual engineering still faces “Lenin’s problem”: the danger that in attempting to alter a concept, even well-intentioned engineers are ultimately trying to change the “consciousness of the marginalized.” Inspired by Jane Addams’s idea of sympathetic knowledge, Boncompagni presents an alternative to conceptual engineering that she calls conceptual care: the development of tools to assist the growth of new and emerging concepts in marginalized communities.

Carter examines the use that some pragmatists have made of the black intellectual tradition (BIT), “the body of belles-lettres, polemical essays, pamphlets, speeches, books, slave narratives, poetry, articles, fiction, and sermons that articulate the experiences in the Americas of African-descendant peoples.” He describes assumptions underlying attempts to connect the BIT to classical pragmatism, e.g., that elements of the BIT illuminate works of pragmatists, that the BIT complements pragmatism, and that pragmatist ideas can be used to correct aspects of the BIT. He examines strategies pragmatists have used to make that connection, from simply assuming that there is such a connection, to arguing from the fact that a black philosopher was taught by a pragmatist to the conclusion that the philosopher’s work is pragmatist in nature, to showing that the ideas of a black philosopher are similar to or compatible with those of a classical pragmatist. Criticizing the tendency to appropriate the BIT in an effort to improve pragmatism without acknowledging that the BIT is itself philiosophical, Carter argues for a more intentional examination of these integrative efforts.

Lane argues that Charles Peirce’s philosophy can contribute to contemporary debates about the metaphysical and moral status of prenatal humans. Some participants in those debates view an early embryo as numerically identical to, and as having the same moral status as, the adult to which it gives rise; bioethicists in this camp tend to maintain that our metaphysical and moral judgments about prenatal humans are capable of objective truth. Others argue from the continuity of prenatal development to the view that metaphysical judgments about when beings like us begin to exist and moral judgments about when beings like us attain moral status cannot be objective. Lane argues that Peirce provides the resources for developing alternative positions. Those resources are Peirce’s synechism, according to which continuity is of central importance in philosophy, his scholastic realism, according to which there are real kinds, his basic realism, according to which there is a world that is the way it is apart from how anyone represents it to be, and his pragmatic clarifications of the concepts of reality and truth.

Donelson argues that pragmatism is a valuable tool in our thinking about three issues surrounding punishment. The first is how punishment should be defined; he argues in favor of understanding punishment in terms of practical criteria, e.g., ensuring that the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is interpreted in a just fashion. The second issue concerns debates about policing and prisons; Donelson argues that pragmatism, and in particular James’s pragmatic method, can help reframe those debates. He describes the respective positions of reformers and abolitionists and suggests, from a Jamesian deflationary perspective, that the reform-versus-abolitionist debate should be approached as a debate over how we should think and speak about policing and imprisonment. The third issue is how best to understand “mass” incarceration. Donelson’s view is that the concept of mass incarceration is normative and that natural facts alone cannot settle the question of what levels of incarceration count as mass and what levels count as unproblematic; on his view, we cannot understand whether a given level counts as mass incarceration without assuming some normative criterion.

In this introduction to Pragmatism Revisited, Robert Lane summarizes the book’s fifteen chapters. Those chapters apply classical and newer pragmatist ideas to a wide range of issues, including the imagination, conceptual change, ignorance, religious fundamentalism, truth in political discourse, authoritarian populism, academic freedom, criminal punishment and mass incarceration, environmental philosophy, bioethics, artificial intelligence, the Black intellectual tradition, feminism, gender, and social construction; the final chapter examines the future of pragmatism itself.