Abstract
Pragmatism, especially the works of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, is in the midst of a revival in American sociology. American sociologists have drawn on these authors in their addressment of contemporary debates in the wider disciplinary field. Placing these contemporary applications of pragmatist thought alongside the broader intellectual tradition of pragmatic philosophy, however, demonstrates tensions associated with this revival. This paper draws on the work of John Dewey as a particularly stark case of the conflict between the philosophy of social science espoused by the original pragmatist philosophers and the use of their ideas in American sociology today. This treatment affords the opportunity to recover a vision for social science which has been overlooked in the contemporary pragmatist revival with deep implications for the practice of social science today.
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Notes
Morris contrasted his perspective with that of Robert K. Merton, arguing that while the social sciences had indeed initially emerged in the Europe, the dominant roots of the American tradition lay in pragmatism.
One possibility that this measure doesn’t capture is that the average number of citations per article has changed. From this perspective, the increasing percent of articles that cite Dewey, James, Peirce, and Mead is driven by the increasing diversification of citations which articles draw upon. Phrased differently, Dewey, James, Peirce and/or Mead are increasingly represented in American sociological citations but this is only because published authors draw on a greater range of authors in their works - citations to these authors have increased, but so have citations to other authors. Accounting for this possibility would require access to all citations of all articles in the sample journals over the past sixty years, which is beyond the scope of this analysis.
Google Scholar was used because of the index’s helpful inclusion of books in its cited author database.
The works by Dewey include Democracy and Education (1916), Experience and Education (1938), How We Think (1910), Art as Experience (1934), The Public and its Problems (1927), Experience and Nature (1925), The School and Society (1899), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), Logic (1938), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), My Pedagogic Creed (1933). The top cited works of Peirce include a number of anthologies: Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1974), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings (1992), “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), “The Fixation of Belief” (1877), Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition (2009), “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (1868), “What Pragmatism Is” (1905). The works by James include The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901-1902), The Principles of Psychology (1890), “The Emotions” (1922), Pragmatism (1975,with Frederick Burkhardt), The Will to Believe (1896), Psychology, Briefer Course (1892), Essays in Radical Empiricism (1906), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), Talks to Teachers on Psychology and ot Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1899), and The Meaning of Truth (1909). Finally, the works by Mead include Mind, Self, and Society (1934), Philosophy of the Present (1932), Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936), The Philosophy of the Act (1938), The Individual and the Social Self (1982), “A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol” (1922), On Social Psychology: Selected Papers, “The Genesis of the Self and Social Control” (1925), “The Psychology of Punitive Justice” (1918), and “The Social Self” (1913).
These journals were compiled for a ranking test for journals by American sociologists. This list was useful because the authors referenced feedback they received from other sociologists regarding journals they missed. Many of the journals, referenced in the Appendix, are not sociology journals and some are also not published in the United States. We included this wide scope, however, to ensure that we were not missing sections of the discipline by focusing on an overly narrow journal set. https://scatter.wordpress.com/2020/01/29/devilish-details-a-reputational-ranking-of-generalist-and-specialist-sociology-journals/
There was one journal that was post-analysis found to also meet this criterion, the Sociology of Health & Illness. This journal has been excluded. This journal had one citation to Mead and one citation to James in 1989 and 1992, respectively. The results discussed below are not sensitive to its exclusion.
According to a letter from Dewey to Hu Shih on March 6, 1940, the volume was be titled “Philosophical Foundations for the Social Sciences” (Dewey, 1940).
Dewey was originally devoted Hegelian idealism and only began developing his instrumentalism in the early 20th century (Shook, 2000, p. 20).
This is Brown (2012)’s argument with other interpreters of Dewey. Brown argues that they have adopted either a too narrow (only focusing on problem situations) or too encompassing view of the situation (i.e. a focus on casual relations).
This quote was referenced in Igo (2007), pg. 84 and comes from the Helen Merrell Lynd Collection, R4:c7.
This essay is not the first to suggest that Lynd was an inheritor of the Deweyan vision for social science. Smith (1994) argued that Lynd was the true inheritor of Dewey as opposed to the “empiricists” such as Wesley Mitchell who also embraced Dewey.
As Igo notes, one interesting part of this idea in Middletown that the average could stand in for the whole is that, statistically speaking, Muncie was far from average for early 20th cities with its largely white, native-born population (Igo, 2007, pg. 55-56)
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Acknowledgements
An early incarnation of this paper was co-authored with Neil Gross, to whom I am grateful for his initial ideas and feedback. I am also grateful to Amanda Cheong, Adam Goldstein, Jeff Guhin, Samantha Jaroszewski, Allison Kenney, Adam Peri, Kim Lane Scheppele, Brandon Stewart, Mélanie Terrasse, Robert Wuthnow, and members of the Center for the Society of Social Organization for their comments on later drafts. Any remaining errors or conceptual misstatements are the author’s own. Finally, I would like to thank Ma Victoria Acuña for her research assistance. Replication code for the citation analysis is available on the corresponding author’s website.
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Appendices
Appendix A: Additional Tables and Figures
Proportion of sample articles citing one of pragmatist, broken out by author cited. Sample restricted to seventy-four journals which had at least two years with at least one author citing one of the pragmatists. Percents aggregated by year
Proportion of articles citing Dewey, James, Peirce, and Mead by journal and year, 1960-present. For journals that began publishing after 1960, the dashed vertical line indicates when they began publishing
Appendix B: Journals Used in Citation Analysis
Publication | Year Included in Google Scholar | |
|---|---|---|
1 | american sociological review | 1936 |
2 | contemporary sociology | 1972 |
3 | contexts | |
4 | journal of health and social behavior | 1967 |
5 | social psychology quarterly | 1979 |
6 | sociological methodology | 1969 |
7 | sociological theory | 1983 |
8 | socius | 2016 |
9 | teaching sociology | 1973 |
10 | city & community | 2002 |
11 | journal of world-systems research | 1995 |
12 | society and mental health | 2011 |
13 | sociology of race and ethnicity | 2015 |
14 | theory and society | 1974 |
15 | the american sociologist | 1965 |
16 | american journal of sociology | 1895 |
17 | social forces | 1922 |
18 | annual review of sociology | 1975 |
19 | sociological science | 2014 |
20 | research on social stratification and mobility | |
21 | social currents | 2014 |
22 | environmental sociology | 2010 |
23 | sociology | |
24 | sociological focus | 1967 |
25 | ethnic and racial studies | 1978 |
26 | poetics | 1971 |
27 | american journal of cultural sociology | 2013 |
28 | sociological perspectives | 1983 |
29 | social science research | 1972 |
30 | qualitative sociology | 1978 |
31 | mobilization | |
32 | the sociological quarterly | 1960 |
33 | comparative sociology | 1960 |
34 | american behavioral scientist | 1957 |
35 | social science history | 1976 |
36 | ethnography | 1990 |
37 | sociology of development | 2015 |
38 | demography | 1964 |
39 | research in the sociology of organizations | 1993 |
40 | sociological inquiry | 1961 |
41 | sociological forum | 1986 |
42 | social problems | 1953 |
43 | international migration review | 1969 |
44 | population research and policy review | 1982 |
45 | journal of marriage and the family | 1964 |
46 | journal of contemporary ethnography | 1975 |
47 | sociological methods and research | 1996 |
48 | gender & society | 1987 |
49 | economy and society | 1972 |
50 | european sociological review | 1985 |
51 | cultural sociology | 2002 |
52 | rural sociology | 1936 |
53 | studies in comparative international development | 1965 |
54 | symbolic interaction | 1977 |
55 | social science and medicine | 1970 |
56 | journal of urbanism | 2008 |
57 | journal for the scientific study of religion | 1961 |
58 | social networks | 1977 |
59 | british journal of sociology | 1950 |
60 | sociology of education | 1963 |
61 | international sociology | 1986 |
62 | current sociology | 1952 |
63 | criminology | |
64 | acta sociologica | 1955 |
65 | socio-economic review | 2003 |
66 | dubois review | |
67 | british journal of criminology | 1960 |
68 | politics and society | 2000 |
69 | sociology of religion | 1940 |
70 | international journal of comparative sociology | 1960 |
71 | american journal of education | 1979 |
72 | administrative science quarterly | 1956 |
73 | european journal of social theory | 1998 |
74 | punishment & society | 1999 |
75 | journal for the theory of social behaviour | 1971 |
76 | theory, culture, and society | 1999 |
77 | sociology of health and illness | 1981 |
78 | organization science | 1990 |
79 | academy of management journal | 1958 |
80 | social politics | |
81 | voluntas | 1990 |
82 | journal of development studies | 1964 |
83 | media, culture, and society | |
84 | social movement studies | 2002 |
85 | society and natural resources | 2004 |
86 | journal of european social policy | 1991 |
87 | journal of policy analysis and management | 1981 |
88 | american educational research journal | 1964 |
89 | comparative political studies | 1968 |
90 | journal of organizational behavior | 1977 |
91 | world development | 1973 |
92 | environmental politics | 1992 |
93 | journal of human resources | 1966 |
94 | journal of consumer research | 1974 |
95 | european journal of sociology | 1960 |
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Waight, H. Recovering John Dewey’s Lost Vision for Social Science in Contemporary American Sociology. Am Soc 52, 420–448 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-021-09482-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-021-09482-4