Abstract

With much talk of President Obama’s pragmatism, there is good reason to explore what this means in terms of his commitments and his policies. When we call Obama a pragmatist, is this merely a way of saying he selects policies and makes decisions that work, quite independent and sometimes against principles he may hold? Or, do we mean to point to something more robust—a kind of pragmatism that emphasizes experimentalism as a cooperative venture, that locates principles in and assesses their worth based on background experiential conditions, that eschews epistemic and practical certainty for fallibilism, that is oriented by a chastened hope, and that is committed to public deliberation as essential to democratic..