The Boston area is the birthplace of American Pragmatism. Charles Peirce was born in Cambridge, and William James spent much of his career teaching at Harvard. The papers in this session will consider how the insights of the classical pragmatists can help us think through and expand contemporary conversations around epistemic responsibility, affect and emotion, and feminist thought and pedagogy,
This paper explores possible neurobiological foundations for some of the central claims of the classical pragmatists. It draws on the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, as well as Joseph Ledoux's The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human, and The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. The paper considers three major shifts in the understanding of the brain, each of which provide biological support for classical pragmatic insights.
- The predictive rather than the perceptual brain supporting Pierce's pragmatic maxim and Dewey's connection of meaning to value.
- Interoception before exteroception supporting James's claim that emotions originate in the visceral needs of the body and that emotions are uniquely individual rather than shared by all animals/humans.
- Cognitive mapping in service of goals supporting Dewey's claims about the associational character of learning and politics.
How international borders function symbolically within public discourse differs notably from the empirical conditions that obtain in specific border spaces. This discrepancy has deleterious consequences, including border militarization, ecological degradation, and narratives of disorder that promote xenophobia. To respond to this problem and promote epistemic responsibility, this paper draws from C.S. Peirce, whose work on logic and semiotics is well-suited to borders for three reasons. First, borders are constitutively semiotic, logically triadic, and indicative of deeply held normative assumptions within public life. Second, Peirce’s contributions to the logic of relations, metaphysics of continuity, and link between theory and practice facilitate analyses of borders both normatively and descriptively. Third, pairing Peirce with borders yields a clearer understanding of the epistemic dimension of borders, facilitates the embedding of the symbolic significance of borders alongside iconic and indexical forms of signification, and integrates empirical studies of borders with those focused on public discourse.
Charles S. Peirce’s concept of abduction emphasizes the intuitive and affective dimensions of inquiry, shaping hypothesizing in our reasoning. This paper explores how the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality—specifically the trait of Openness to Experience—illuminates Peirce’s theory of abduction. Openness, characterized by intellectual curiosity, imagination, and aesthetic sensitivity, aligns with Peirce’s emphasis on feeling and curiosity in rational inquiry.
Analyzing Openness through FFM reveals two key insights. First, genetic predispositions significantly influence individuals’ engagement in inquiry, suggesting that Peirce’s ideal community of inquirers may not be easily attainable. Second, Openness evolves over time, with a decline in attitudinal flexibility, raising questions about the sustainability of Peirce’s fallibilistic conditions for inquiry. These findings suggest that Peirce’s epistemology may require nuanced considerations that accounts for cognitive rigidity in later life. Ultimately, this paper argues that the FFM can contribute to our understanding of abduction in contemporary cultural and psychological contexts.
This presentation illuminates the implications of Jane Addams’s feminist pragmatist approach to education for the cultivation of ethical freedom for democracy. Although she is one of the most influential feminist pragmatists in the United States, incorporating Christian faith and pragmatism through her activism at Hull House for democratic social reform, Addams has not received due scholarly attention in religious studies. I conduct a philosophical and historical analysis of Addams’s theory of social change by contextualizing it in her faith-based activism and pedagogy. After discussing the development of her pragmatist philosophy within the context of her activism, my presentation examines her philosophy of education and unpacks her racial and colonial ideologies to glean pedagogical insights for contemporary religious scholars. Drawing from Jane Addams’s pedagogy for democracy, I argue that religious education can contribute to ethical freedom by humanizing social relations with the virtues of ethical imagination, compassion, and creativity.