Gerald Bivens

It is customary to distinguish the 'classical pragmatists' — Peirce, James and Dewey — from such living 'neopragmatists' as Quine, Goodman, Putnam and Davidson. The break between the two is the so-called 'linguistic turn'. This was the turn philosophers took when, dropping the topic of experience and picking up that of language, they began taking their cure from Frege rather than from Locke. In the US, this turn was taken only in the 1940s and 1950s, and it was as a result of this turn that James and Dewey ceased to be read in American philosophical departments.¹

Had [Dewey] read Popper, he would have applauded Popper's fallibilism while deploring the dualisms which Popper, like Carnap, took for granted. For the logical empiricist movement, of which Carnap and Popper were representatives — the movement which was to shove pragmatism brusquely aside, in American departments of philosophy, after the Second World War ‐ reinvented the sharp Kantian distinctions between fact and value, and between science on the one hand and ideology, metaphysics and religion on the other. These were distinctions which both James and Dewey had done their best to blur. The logical empiricists had, with the help of Frege and Russell, linguistified all the old Kantian distinctions which Dewey thought Hegel had helped us to overcome. The history of the re-dissolution of those distinctions by the neopragmatists, under the leadership of Quine, is the story of the re-pragmatization — and thus the de-Kantianizing and the re-Hegelianizing — of American philosophy.²