Abstract

I argue that genuine evolutionary naturalism, which characterized the first generation of pragmatism (Dewey, James, Peirce, and Mead) was replaced by a kind of naturalism that was not in any thorough-going way genuinely evolutionary. Tracing the form of naturalism inherited by Rorty and his generation to Quine's and C.I. Lewis's forms of pragmatism, I argue that this is not naturalism in any empirically defensible sense, mainly because it cannot accommodate scientific inquiry that depends on processual ideas and concepts as opposed to narrowly linguistic concepts.