This chapter elaborates and defends the author's interpretation of Dewey's work. It traces Dewey's concern that philosophy be connected with life to James's famous criterion of significance—to repeat: a criterion of significance for philosophical questions—and explore what it might mean to... see more

This chapter was written at a stage when the author's sympathies with pragmatism were fragmentary and tentative. The naturalism this chapter considers and advocates strikes the author today as timid and hedged. For, although it applauds the reintroduction of psychology within epistemology ... see more

This chapter offers a thoroughly pragmatic response to the four principal versions of the inaccessibility of reality. It argues that Galileo's defense of his new telescope is a model for methodology and epistemology. Starting from an everyday understanding of our abilities to know, Galileo... see more

This chapter shows how Carnap's conception of the proper goals and methods of philosophy can be used to support a pragmatist critique of some current tendencies in the philosophy of science. Carnap takes an important project of scientific philosophy to be the construction of systems of exa... see more

This chapter develops the reconstructionist demand more globally. Its negative thrust challenges philosophers to reflect on the problems and projects they pursue: could they cogently explain how the questions they address admit potentially justifiable answers that can reasonably be expecte... see more