Charles Sanders Peirce — son of Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce, polymath, fired from Johns Hopkins in a Victorian scandal — published an article in Popular Science Monthly in January 1878 titled How to Make Our Ideas Clear. The essay introduced the pragmatic maxim: the meaning of an idea is the practical difference it makes. The maxim sounds like a methodological footnote. It was the founding move of the major American philosophical tradition. His friend William James popularized it, gave it the name pragmatism in 1898, and pushed it past science into religion, ethics, and truth itself. Peirce, horrified by what James had done with his idea, renamed his own version pragmaticism — a word so ugly nobody would steal it. John Dewey extended the tradition into education, democracy, and social ethics across a forty-year career at Chicago and Columbia.
The pragmatic maxim has three substantive consequences. First, pragmatism is anti-foundationalist: it rejects grounding knowledge on indubitable foundations (Descartes's cogito, the sense-data of empiricists, Kant's categories). Inquiry begins in the middle of things, with the beliefs we happen to hold, and proceeds by correcting them as practice requires. Second, it is fallibilist: any belief could turn out to be wrong, and we have no method for definitively closing the question. Third, it has a distinctive theory of truth: Peirce defined truth as the opinion fated to be ultimately agreed by all who investigate; James's more permissive formulation — truth is what works — was seized on by critics as license for wishful thinking, and Peirce thought it misrepresented his original move. William James's The Will to Believe (1897) and Pragmatism (1907) extended the framework beyond Peirce's scientific scope. John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916) argued that democracy is not just a political arrangement but a way of life requiring educated citizens capable of inquiry; The Public and Its Problems (1927) defended democratic deliberation against Walter Lippmann's expert-managerial alternative. George Herbert Mead's Mind, Self, and Society (1934) developed the social-self as constituted by taking the role of the generalized other. W. E. B. Du Bois's use of pragmatist epistemology in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) has been re-emphasized in recent scholarship as belonging at the center of the tradition rather than its periphery.
Pragmatism re-entered the analytic mainstream through Quine's naturalism and Sellars's rejection of the myth of the given. The most-publicized revival was Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), which attacked the representationalist picture of mind-as-mirror and proposed a pragmatist-conversational picture of inquiry. Rorty's anti-realist gloss was contested even within pragmatism; Hilary Putnam and Cheryl Misak argued that pragmatism is compatible with realism and that the Rortian reading misreads Peirce. In political philosophy, deliberative democracy (Habermas, independently) runs on broadly Deweyian commitments. Pragmatism in legal theory runs through Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s The Common Law (1881) through Llewellyn and the Legal Realists to contemporary legal pragmatism. The tradition offers a third way between correspondence-theory realism and late-twentieth-century anti-realism.