five main features of pragmatism and mostly putting all the emphasis on the

anti-foundationalism. Next is fallibilism. Namely, the understanding that, and

this I would say is very strongly argued today by Hilary Putnam, we can reach
truth. The position is not relativist at all, but includes that we can never be sure
whether we have reached truth. It is not, in that sense, authoritarian and it is
not like the teaching of the church: 'This is truth, you have to accept it'. Instead
every statement is only a validity claim. You claim to make a true statement.
That is the pragmatist way: not to be relativist; not to be sceptic; but also not to
be authoritarian or dogmatic - that is fallibilism. The third component is the
social character of the self. The self is not simply there but is itself the result of
a subjective construction, you could say, but construction not in the sense of the
social constructionists. It is not a mere discursive phenomenon but it is some-
thing that the child develops in the course of his infancy and his later develop
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ment. One could argue that, for example, Rorty is very weak with regard to that.
Even James is weak with regard to that. Mead is very strong, and so on. I think
that helps to systematize these things. The fourth point in Bernstein is called
the importance of research but I think this is what I would call 'creative intel-
ligence'. This is the understanding of action as being creative in all forms of
action. The fifth is metaphysical pluralism versus monism. James wrote a book
A Pluralistic Universe (1977 [1909]) and this has many religious connotations. Is
there one omnipotent God? Or how do we explain the origin of evil and so on?
You would say this dimension is absent in the non-metaphysical pragmatists, of
course, but very important for James and Peirce.
I found the article by Bernstein very helpful. He would say, on the one hand
it is true to say from the 1930s on pragmatism more or less disappeared, but
on the other hand it is better to say that it lost its hegemony. It had a certain
hegemony in America, not outside America, between 1900 and 1930 or so. But
it completely lost this hegemony. Bernstein is one of the few people who sort
of propagated pragmatism during that phase, but if we look more closely, in
philosophy in the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, for
example, they have been very active for many years. There has always been sec-
ondary literature and it is quite interesting stuff but completely ignored by the
analytical philosophy and also by the continentals because it is not European.

RS: I would say that it was in social science practice where pragmatism has re-
mained, to answer to your question. It has had a new life in social practices
among people who are doing ethnographic work, which has had a resurgence
in sociology. Sophisticated ethnographic work really draws on anthropologi-
cal experience over a century. It now almost requires pragmatism as a kind of
philosophical foundation because the interactions between somebody doing
research indepth, face to face with some one else within the community can
create problems - for instance, replication disappears - that is, you are look-
ing at the gestation of the set of meanings. There is interaction that is situated
between the interviewer and the subject and this is no longer seen as a passive
gathering of information. In my part of sociology, I think this is a necessary re-
turn. To find a theoretical foundation for what ethnography knows that the sur-
vey researcher can never know. What kind of knowledge is it that is produced?