Review, The Chicago School of Pragmatism by John R. Shook. Thoemmes Press, 2000.

Review appeared in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. 38:4, Fall 2002, pp.
698-704.

The Chicago School of Pragmatism (Series: History of American Thought)

Edited and introduced by John R. Shook, with additional introductions by Frank X. Ryan.
4 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001.
Hardcover , 1400 pages
List Price: USD 395.00

Reviewed by David L. Hildebrand, University of Colorado Denver

Pragmatist William James’ 1904 exclamation that “Chicago has a School of Thought!” exhibiting
“real thought and a real school” was exactly right. Now, nearly a century later, we have a real
compendium (137 articles) of the works central to this school. This valuable series complements
several other pragmatist-centered series Shook has pulled together (among them, “Chicago
Functionalists,” “Early Critics of Pragmatism” and “Early Defenders of Pragmatism”). Taken
together, these series offer scholars an exceptionally convenient historical resource. They are part of
Thoemmes Press’s ambitious History of American Thought project, which aims to bring together
elusive or out-of-print titles. The historical breadth of Thoemmes’ project is laudable for it extends
beyond works by the pragmatists to examinations of the St. Louis Hegelians, as well as early
American receptions of Darwin, Hume, and the German idealists, to name just a few.
There is little to criticize in this well-chosen and well-introduced series. This review will
comment mainly on selected strengths in each of the four volumes and conclude with some general
remarks about the series.

Volume One

Volume One, “Experience, Knowledge, and Reality,” is devoted largely to the “core” of
Instrumentalism: functional psychology, logic and epistemology, and metaphysics. The pieces are
well chosen and smartly arranged. Shook’s introduction gives an overview of the Chicago School
and summarizes the volume’s contents. In addition, it contains some helpful lists, such as important
Chicago professors and graduate students, and selected philosophy publications by the University of
Chicago’s during this period. (Puzzlingly, the references to Shook’s introduction includes books not
cited specifically. The volume’s index lists some of these works, but not all. This is confusing for the
reader who expects that index entries should lead to elaboration on a point, rather than just a
bibliographic note.)
Early pieces show how functionalism violated both psychological and philosophical
expectations by denying dualism and situating the mental in nature. Dewey’s seminal “Psychology
and Philosophic Method” sounds a clarion call for the Chicago School by arguing against the
extreme, Cartesian individualism dominating psychology; instead, psychological hypotheses must be
formulated in ways that integrate the political and social. Dewey’s recommendations regarding
method and the expansion of subject matters echoes and develops in subsequent selections. Mead’s
“The Definition of the Psychical,” for example, advocates a functional and social account of
experience which will demand the reconfiguration of the language of many disciplines; fundamental,
of course, will be changes to key philosophical relations such as the “psychical” to the “practical”
and, famously, the very boundaries of the “self.”

The selves of our scientific theory are part of the data which reflection presents to us....[O]ne
of the results of the reconstruction will be a new individual as well as a new social
environment. ...It is the self of unnecessitated choice, of undreamt hypotheses., of inventions
that change the whole face of nature.” (pp. 67-68)

H. Heath Bawden (who is rarely collected in pragmatism compilations—this series contains six
pieces by him) was strongly influenced by Dewey’s “circuit” model of mind. He provides a concise
account of how the psychical/physical distinction developed historically and assesses what
“psychical” means from the new functionalist standpoint. (It is somewhat surprising that Dewey’s
“The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” written while Dewey was at Chicago, is not included
here—its influence upon the other articles collected in this volume is overt. While readily available
elsewhere, its inclusion would make this volume more self sufficient.)
Dewey’s “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” firmly transports us from psychology to
philosophy, showing that reconstructing the psychic/physical distinction will also require boldly
confronting the Appearance/Reality dualism. Dewey’s postulate reiterates an important
methodological principle advanced in this volumes first selection of Dewey’s regarding the starting
point: “[T]he real significance of the principle [that things are what they are experienced to be] is
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that of a method of philosophical analysis—a method identical in kind...with that of the scientist.”
(p. 106)
Other articles advance now familiar epistemological thrusts by pragmatists. James H. Tufts
and Addison Moore detail problems with traditional copy theories of knowledge, concluding that
they lack a teleological criterion, i.e., a pragmatic one aimed at enhancing experience. We also see
Dewey setting out what he would later call the “pattern of inquiry”; here, it is called the “successive
species of the relationship which doubting bears to assurance”. (p. 135) Dewey also mulls over the
definition of “truth,” and suggests that there is no individual truth at all, strictly speaking; truth
consists of social principles regulating community action, achieved by experiment, and resulting in
“a situation marked by certain immediate qualities…that appeal to the hand, the eyes, the nose, and
to the emotions.”(p. 272)
The metaphysical implications of experience are explored as well. Tufts and Kate Gordon
each analyze aesthetic experience and judgment pragmatically, connecting both to past and future
social conditions. Not all here is warm and cozy agreement, however. A.K. Rogers makes trouble for
Chicago comity by insisting on the realist point that reconstructed knowledge simply discovers an
“element which we had not recognized before in the unity of reality [that] was really there.” (p. 134)
(Having dissident voices like Rogers interspersed throughout this series is a major plus, for it helps
recreate the conversation that was integral to the Chicago’s intellectual achievement as a school.) At
the end of this volume, William K. Wright gives an account of the social and pragmatic beginnings
of several traditional metaphysical categories such as space, cause and effect, and truth. While these
categories originated for functional reasons, Wright argues it is nevertheless tenable to hold them as
both enduringly stable and yet not the products of a radically subjective consciousness.

Volume Two

Volume Two, “Morality, Society, Education, and Religion” shows the Chicagoans arguing
for and engaging in the concerted and wide-ranging application of philosophy to social issues. There
is, as Dewey puts it in “Logical Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality” a “postulate of
continuity of experience” (p. 29) which connects science and ethics: both determine their objects by
reference to a practical starting point (i.e., “experience as activity”) and both must return experience
to test the validity of their judgments. Tufts sees the implication of Dewey’s general postulate and
makes it central in what he coins “The Social Standpoint.” Even something as seemingly discrete as
one’s “personality” grows by cross-checking a plurality of biological instincts and immediate
reactions; in short, the self is many and one, and is many before it is one. The point: sociality must
become the dominant epistemological starting point in philosophy as well as in economics, politics,
and religion.
Connected to these general points is another regarding values. Moral values, and the norms
governing their application, must not be sought not in transcendent metaphysical sources but within
experience itself. In “The Philosophical Basis of Ethics” Mead writes, “The possibility of intelligent
action waits upon the determination of the conditions under which that action is to take place. (p. 62)
Once it is seen that the arena in which values are consulted, applied, and reconstructed is the here-
and-now, it becomes obvious, Dewey writes, that we must “converge all the instrumentalities of the
social arts, of law, education, economics and political science upon the construction of intelligent
methods of improving the common lot.” (From “Ethics,” a lecture reprinted in 1910 in The Influence
of Darwin on Philosophy as “Intelligence and Morals”; here, p. 79.)
Integrating values into education must be done prudently, with the child’s psychology
foremost in mind. For example, Dewey and Mead argue that morals education cannot proceed
through direct indoctrination or through the punishment of a child’s divided attention; rather, a
cooperative teacher-student relationship is indispensable for sharing values. The same lesson holds
for religious instruction, which must approach its task, argue Dewey, Edward Ames, and Irving
King, with an appreciation for the situations and problems of its learners. As Dewey notes, to force
upon the child the “mature ideas or spiritual emotions” of adults risks “forestalling future deeper
experiences” (p. 207). Anna Strong raises the metaphysical question implied by these pedagogical
re-orientations: “what [are] these pragmatists are going to do with God” once absolutism is defeated?
Nothing, Strong replies, for God is to be reinterpreted with experience as the pivotal category, and so
may be seen as a dynamic and evolving reality.
It is quite gratifying to see the inclusion of works by and about Ella Flagg Young and Jane
Addams. Young writes carefully about how education should remain attentive to students’ need for
greater freedom in the classroom, without implying that this permits the release of all spontaneous
impulses. Addams, in essays startlingly relevant to America in the 21st century, marries insights
about sociality and politics together and explains how the educational system often fails to
incorporate new immigrants into democratic American life. She suggests that rather than simply
preparing people to become efficient sprockets in industry, education must make the new American
worker “widely at home in the world, and…[it must] give him a sense of simplicity and peace in the
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midst of the triviality and noise to which he is constantly subjected.” (p. 148) Mead and Tufts
contribute three laudatory reviews of Addams' work.

Volume 3

Of great benefit to readers of this series are the masterful introductions to volumes 3 and 4 by
Frank X. Ryan. Ryan’s prose has the eloquent flow of a good historian and the cut-at-the-joints
precision of a top philosopher. Volume Three, “Early Debates on Instrumentalism, 1903-1911,”
covers the period from 1903-1912 (not 1911 as indicated in the title). The first part of the book
traces Chicago’s debt to and journey away from the “personalistic” emphases of James and Schiller
toward more objective standpoints. We are also made privy to some heated disputes over the
viability of functionalist psychology, as well as the epistemological debates between pragmatists,
idealists, and realists.
In section 2 we find authors laboring to make functional psychology a stable alternative to
the bifurcation between idealists’ all-encompassing view that the mind conditions all reality and the
biologists’ quest to reduce consciousness to biological processes. James Mark Baldwin (who was not
a member of the Chicago school, but whose inclusion by the editor serves dialogical purposes)
maintains that pragmatism’s waffling between monism and dualism can only be rescued by an
“intelligence” imbued with a priori universal structures and that, ultimately, can “stand on its own.”
Baldwin is forcefully resisted by figures such as A. Moore, who claims that while basic logical rules
seem intrinsic, they are more plausibly explained genetically, that is, by an account of how habits,
formed in experience, become the noncognitive background from which we operate.
Section 3 lays out a fine array of idealist attacks on pragmatism, along with defenses by
Dewey and Bawden. Among the idealist charges fleshed out here are that pragmatists’ attempts to
base metaphysical categories upon interest and activity fail because they are neither necessary nor
ontologically basic; that pragmatism’s account of practical experience was already formulated
adequately by Kant (who requires no pragmatist updating); that pragmatist immediacy reduces
experience to a mere wisp of what is offered by idealism; and that pragmatism deceives when it
claims to “overcome” philosophical problems—in truth, the pragmatists’ philosophical ends are as
traditional as the tradition’s. These arguments against pragmatism are similar enough to ones
fomented in the last couple decades to give this reader the melancholy image of the pragmatist-as-
Sisyphus.
 The final section shows Dewey and early 20th century realists squaring off. Unquestionably
central here was the charge that despite Dewey’s welcome empiricism, his instrumentalism falters
when it suggests that reality and subjective psychological experience are coextensive—“no
experience, no reality” as McGilvary sums Dewey up. In various rejoinders, replies, and disclaimers,
Dewey tries to make the methodological import of his view of experience clear—to be real is always
to be possibly verified in the outcome of some kind of inquiry. Thus, his view does not deny that
there are events which are isolated from our experience, either temporally or causally. (Again, the
contemporary pragmatist is tempted to marvel at at how perpetually these rejoinders need
reiteration.) The volume ends with a lengthy exchange between Dewey and New realist Edward G.
Spaulding, who endeavor to codify the points of agreement between them.

Volume 4

Volume 4, “Later Debates on Instrumentalism, 1912-1970,” picks up where the last volume
left off. (Again, the title slightly misleads—most of articles are from the late teens to mid-1930s—
there are very few pieces after the 1940s.) The first section, as in volume three, begins with
ruminations about pragmatism’s origins and destiny; this time the extended focus is upon C.S.
Peirce. Five short pieces by Dewey, four of them from the New Republic, are collected here, and an
interesting debate between Schiller and Morris manifest Chicago’s leanings away from Jamesean-
personalism and toward Peircean-objectivism.
Section two, as in volume three, centers upon debates with idealists; here, however, the target
is the “mature” Dewey of Experience and Nature. We see idealists attacking instrumentalist logic for
its lack of universality and for its relapse into a narrow egocentrism that cannot account for nature.
Hoernlé, for example, argues that the not only is the instrumental approach to knowledge
insignificant as a contribution, it is “disastrous.” His romantic disappointment is palpable as he
questions whether pragmatists would ever be able to share his way of feeling “the whole push of the
universe” and his recognition that knowledge can both be useful and “worth while for its own sake.”
(p. 105)
The following section also develops an earlier volume’s theme, only here we the conflict is
between Dewey and a second wave of realists, the “critical realists.” Despite changes in the realists’
epistemology, realism and pragmatism remain opposed due in no small part to the construal of
reality Dewey will countenance. Of special interest here is Chicagoan A.K. Rogers’ refusal to
renounce traditional realism’s belief that existents must be considered wholly independent of all
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subjective experience. (Unfortunately, this is also more windmill-tilting—Rogers never understood

how Dewey denied the equivocation of “experience” and “subjective experience.”)
The series returns to the topic of values in the penultimate section, though this time without
directly tying values to their integration with practice (e.g., in education, politics, and religious
instruction). As with the pragmatist view of knowledge, value—better, “valuation”— is connected to
ongoing situations and future outcomes. Reformers such as Ralph B. Perry and George P. Adams
oppose the Chicago view and insist that values are tied to facts, not judgments. Pragmatists, so their
now-familiar charge goes, overestimate “activity” and neglect the intrinsically valuable objects
outside human enterprise. Replies to these attacks come from the likes of Thomas Smith, Mead, and
Tufts.
The series ends, appropriately, with a medley of “meta-narratives” about pragmatism at
Chicago written after the school’s demise around 1930. These essays by Morris Cohen, Max Otto,
Mortimer Adler, and Charles Morris do what one might expect: weigh in (pro and con) on Dewey’s
legacy, connect pragmatism with the larger world through democracy, and assign a meaning to the
Chicago experience itself. Morris’ piece, “The Chicago School,” is concise and historical and could
easily have served as this series’ opening piece.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this series is highly recommended. Good-to-superb introductions and an

intelligent choice of articles invite readers to witness a vibrant and multifaceted period in the
evolution of several disciplines. Dewey scholars will benefit especially by many articles chronicling
his examination by (and debate with) realists and idealists, as well as the way in which his views
were interpreted and applied by his colleagues and students. Throughout the four volumes, the
exchanges are vigorous, ideologies are varied, and the activism is unapologetic. Such a collection is
available nowhere else.
The books themselves are well-made and designed for long use. Footnotes (rather than
endnotes) are a welcome convenience. Alas, each volume has only a name index, a serious and
avoidable deficiency for a series clearly intended for a scholarly audience. Also unfortunate is the
price. While there is word that this series may someday be available in paperback, right now the
series is priced at $400 USD, which is likely too expensive for many individuals and libraries on
cautious budgets. It is lamentable that the necessities of pricing could retard the serious contribution
to pragmatist scholarship advanced by these volumes. One hopes that these materials might someday
be available online at a fraction of the cost.

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