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eleven Cultural Pragmatism and the Disappearance of Dewey’s Naturalism Dewey’s concerted efforts through the ¤rst three decades of the twentieth century to de¤ne the scienti¤c, cultural, and political implications of his conceptions of pragmatism and human intelligence invited critical scrutiny and misinterpretation. Although applauded for its magisterial breadth, the central conceptions and arguments of Dewey’s Logic continue to elude many of Dewey’s philosophical heirs. Some contemporary thinkers like Richard Rorty dismiss Dewey’s theory of inquiry as a regrettable but excusable mistake. Dewey’s aesthetic theory, although largely unappreciated during his lifetime, has been revived by some scholars who have made room there for Dewey’s naturalism. Dewey’s social and political theory has also ®ourished among theorists who argue that Dewey expressed in thought and deed an unwavering commitment to a democratic conception of community life. However, contemporary philosophers’ attempts to articulate the moral foundations of Dewey’s pragmatism have attracted criticism among adherents of post-modernism, who deny that any such unequivocal principles can be formulated. Dewey could have been easily exhausted by having to conduct a defense of his ideas on so many fronts had he not had help from intensely loyal if sometimes misguided supporters. But perhaps the greatest challenge Dewey faced, expressed best in the intellectual encounter he had with Arthur Bentley in the last two decades of his life, was sustaining the primacy of phenomenal experience in human growth and scienti¤c inquiry. Bentley’s pointed and presumptuous criticisms of Dewey’s Logic were intended to help Dewey clarify his arguments for inclusion in a 1949 book they co-authored, Knowing and the Known. But Bentley did more than anyone else to shake Dewey’s con¤dence in the possibility of retaining his conception of experience as the centerpiece of pragmatism. As noted before, when Dewey prepared a new introduction to a revised version of Experience and Nature, he dejectedly declared that he would replace the word “experience” with “culture” because he had lost any hope of making the philosophical signi¤cance of the term clear to his critics. The dif¤culties Dewey had in sustaining an unambiguous notion of experience and his own concessions to the importance of culture foreshadowed the linguistic turn of pragmatism, not only at the hands of Dewey’s own contemporaries , but by a second generation of neo-pragmatists unable to reach a consensus about how to interpret and put Dewey’s legacy in contemporary perspective . To be certain, some of Dewey’s adherents, such as Joseph Ratner, Morton White, and Sidney Hook, tried to be true to Dewey by con¤ning their interpretations to the context of Dewey’s ideas about nature and experience. Ratner and White were reasonably successful in this endeavor because they were willing to accept Dewey’s naturalism and evolutionism at face value. In contrast, Ernest Nagel, enthralled by the bold vision of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists for a uni¤ed science, believed that pragmatism would not be compromised if it incorporated realist epistemic assumptions inimical to its phenomenalism and naturalism. And while Hook accepted Dewey’s naturalism , he unwittingly sundered the connections Dewey wished to sustain between science and metaphysics by making phenomenal experience and generic traits harmless background assumptions that would not jeopardize the scienti¤c respectability of pragmatism. The cultural-discursive strain in Deweyan pragmatism has attracted many contemporary proponents who have turned away from the phenomenology of experience in favor of sustaining a dialogue among a community of scholars seeking to articulate an ethic for a democratic way of life. While Dewey was strongly committed to free discourse in a democratic society, he never believed that public life consisted solely of a Habermasian cognitive exercise in achieving a rational and ethical consensus. Communities engaged in solving problems of public consequence must be capable of suspending disbelief, forging collaborations, and attempting experimental solutions that defy precise conceptualization and rarely involve unambiguous moral consequences. This chapter examines why Dewey’s naturalism has all but disappeared in the works of many of his philosophical successors who have gotten sidetracked into endless debates with Richard Rorty about whether or not pragmatism can sustain its claim to be an American public philosophy. Nevertheless, Rorty’s provocative critique of Dewey’s metaphysics merits close inspection because he has made the strongest case against Dewey’s naturalism, arguing that Dewey’s notion of generic traits and his emphasis on method are dispensable and inconsequential to the survival of pragmatism...

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