Abstract

Scholarly discussion of pragmatism today is pulled in the two different directions of a deconstructive historicism and a semiotic foundationalism. These two directions are co-present in the work of one of pragmatism's founders, Charles Peirce, but accompanied for the most part by a different sentiment. When the two are brought together today it is in debate, and the co-presence is marked by anxiety. In Peirce's work, and in that of the classical pragmatists generally, the copresence was within the work of one thinker and was generally marked by a sentiment of assurance that the difference between the two was constructive and that the thinker possessed the key to mediating between them. The thesis of this essay is that the uniquely pragmatic aspect of Peirce's pragmatism is this sentiment, alone, which I therefore label “the sentiment of pragmatism.” The other features of his pragmatism exhibit the consequences, within his philosophic inquiries, of his having responded from out of his pragmatic sentiment to the problems and conflicts that concerned him.