Sign Process

2003-08-28T10:21:00.000-05:00

Summer Wrap-up Post

Well, my summer is almost over. I start grad school in a few weeks and in the meantime will be making a cross-country trip from Chicago to San Diego. Blogging has been a lot of fun but my frequency will probably decrease as I settle into grad student mode. Check back every once in a while though, as I plan to keep posting. I leave you with two things: my recent experiences reading Douglas Browning and my academic interests.

Douglas Browning has become my favorite living thinker. I've been reading and rereading Ontology and the Practical Arena for the past 3 weeks and profiting immensely from it. It is one of my three favorite books (along with Dewey's Logic and Mead's philosophy of the present). I think I have some idea of why Browning has been so helpful to me, and it is this: 1) He is concerned with the question of how to theoretically investigate topics whose subject matter is not well defined. 2) He gives practice a central role in his thought. Both of these are crucial for me too.

Now my academic interests: I am interested in constructing a coherent and empirically sound account of the interlocking realms of politics, technology, law, and economics around the complementary rubrics of practice and institutions.

Thanks for stopping by!

2003-08-19T14:11:00.000-05:00

Mead's buried Treasure

I love George Mead because he was so gutsy. He had to know that none of his contemporaries would understand The Philosophy of the Act, that it would probably not be published, much less grasped, in his life time. I for one am profoundly grateful to him for tossing the historic ball our way. This one blows me away, for example:

"The epistemological problem is found in the objectivity of that which is subjective. The problem of relativity is found in the subjectivity of that which is objective. The solution of the epistemological problem is found in the recognition of the objectivity of the apparatus by which we reach the subjective, and the necessity of accepting the natural history of the individual and the community within which this apparatus was acquired. The solution of the relativist's problem is found in the recognition that the emergent value which the individual organism confers upon the common world belongs to that world in so far as it leads to its creative reconstruction. In so far as the world is passing into a future, there is an opportunity for that which is not objective to become objective."

This is buried in the miscellaneous fragments on perspectives section at the end of the book.

2003-08-18T12:02:00.000-05:00

Linguistic Anthropology

I have recently become aware of linguistic anthropology, but have yet to delve deeply. This weekend I checked out a book called Natural Histories of Discourse, edited by Silverstein and Urban, and spent about a half hour browsing through it. I found a lot of the material very exciting and relevant, but I also felt stymied by what I hope were only terminological difficulties. I think I might turn to a different volume for firmer footing, and to that end I believe I will look for some of the items on this Syllabus for Linguistic Anthropology of Education, a class taught by stanton wortham at Penn.

2003-08-15T09:36:00.000-05:00

This one looks interesting: A neuro-socio-cognitive model of self-awareness with an emphasis on inner speech. I've only read a little but Mead is discussed.

2003-08-12T13:15:00.000-05:00

The Browning-Bourdieu Link

"[The order of the practical arena] cannot be articulated in its own native applicability as a system, for the point of such an order is not the achievement of a 'systematic' but a practical understanding. If a system is to be applied to the practical arena, it can only be by means of moving from a "presystematic" to a 'systematic' level of consideration, by means, that is, of the application of a structure derived from another climate of concern and devoted to a different conception of understanding and significance.
-- Douglas Browning, Ontology and the Practical Arena

"Even if reciprocity is the objective truth of the discrete acts which ordinary experience knows in discrete form and calls gift exchanges, it is not the whole truth of a practice which could not exist if it were consciously perceived in accordance with the model."
-- Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice

Who else besides Hildebrand is building on browning?

2003-08-11T10:03:00.000-05:00

Here are the five books I most want to read in the near future, in no particular order:

Hans Joas: Pragmatism and social Theory
Paul Dourish: Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction
Joseph Margolis: Pragmatism Without Foundations
Joseph Schumpter: History of Economic Analysis
Pierre Bourdieu: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

2003-08-08T11:07:00.000-05:00

Can Erkki Kilpinen shed light on Mead's relevance to economics?

Erkki Kilpinen, despite lacking a home page, seems to be a person. He just took his phd (sociology 2000) with a thesis entitled "The Enormous Fly-Wheel of Society: Pragmatism’s Habitual Conception of Action and Social Theory." (Helsinki: University of Helsinki) He has been a member of the Helsinki Metaphysical Club. He lists his current interests as (i) Peirce's general conception of human (and animal) rationality, (ii) G.H. Mead, and (iii) Pragmatistic social theory. Sounds promising. Even more exciting, however, are his recent forays into institutional economics with such essays as "What is Rationality? A New Reading of Veblen’s Critique of Utilitarian Hedonism", International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 13(2), pp. 187-206, and (I've actually read this one) "Does Pragmatism Imply Institutionalism?" which is in the current (june 2003) issue of the Journal of Economic Issues. Then there is his recent Semiotica article "A Neglected Classic Vindicated. The Place of George Herbert Mead in the General Tradition of Semiotics."

Kilpinen is already being cited by philosophically savvy institutionalists like Geoffrey Hodgson. And he seems to sense an opening between strictly philosophical pragmatist concerns and the highly applied nature of much economic scholarship. But thus far his work has been mostly in the mode of consolidation. Kilpinen seems poised to pounce. But will he pull the trigger?

Disclaimer: I am a naive little boy.

[update: I've found what seems to be two pictures of Kilpinen in a turtleneck. ]

2003-08-07T15:38:00.000-05:00

A Plethora of Manicas

Yesterday I couldn't post anything because blogger was broken all day. However, I did manage to uncover some cool stuff by Peter Manicas like this review of Festenstein's book on Pragmatism and Political Theory and another review of a book about russian interpretations of american thought by John Ryder. There is also this challenging and unpublished piece whch scrutinizes many of Dewey's basic concepts, including his logic, in the context of realism, idealism and materialism. And Marx is in there too. Oops, I said Marx. Anyway, it's called Naturalism and Subjectivism: Philosophy for the Future? Manicas' mild critique of Dewey's fundamental approach didn't really resonate with me, but it did cause me to bump up Joseph Margolis a notch on the "to read" list.

2003-08-06T13:47:00.000-05:00

Science studies and political commitments

Brian Martin is a dissident physicist who started doing science studies stuff about 15 years ago. His site is full of interesting books and papers. Go there now. Make sure you read the following article: Captives of Controversy: The Myth of the Neutral Social Researcher in Contemporary Scientific Controversies. Apparently it caused quite a stir in denying that science studies researchers should try to remain neutral in the sundry controversies to which they applied their demystifying epistemic elixirs. See especially the reply by Collins, who is apparently a bigwig. I should shut up now since I have no idea whose toes I am treading on.

Martin also gives a shout out to one of my own, Chandra Mukerji, and her book A Fragile Power. Chandra is the director of the Science Studies program at UCSD and I had an enjoyable chat with her in her office last april. Hey Chandra! What are we reading next month?

2003-08-05T10:17:00.000-05:00

Are logical forms relative to specific kinds of inquiries?

I'm currently mulling over a quote by Tom Burke which I found on the Dewey list (incidentally there is a lot of great discussion archived over there) and which doesn't seem correct to me.

"More importantly, the logical forms of inquiry into inquiry will be nothing more nor less than the logical forms of inquiry, period. Inquiry into inquiry has no special logical forms all its own. Logical forms allegedly apply to *every* inquiry, including logic itself! We have misunderstood what he means by "logical forms" to even ask the question "What, then, of the logical forms of inquiry into inquiry?" Any forms or principles that apply to or in logic itself but not to inquiry in general will be special forms or principles of logic but not "logical forms" or "logical principles" (in the one sense of "logical"). "Logic forms" are not specific to any particular kind of inquiry but to inquiry in general."

Burke seems to say that for something to be considered a logical form, then it must not only yield warranted assertions in specific types of inquiry, but also...what? In all of them? In application to inquiry into inquiry in general, only? There are many kinds of inquiries going on out there, and inquiry into them, it seems to me, is basically an untouched frontier from a Deweyan point of view. I have isolated one type of primary inquiry which I call the technological platform and am currently investigating what I take to be its logical forms. Is such an inquiry into inquiry not Logic?

2003-08-04T09:52:00.000-05:00

Look what I found while grubbing uninvited through the BRC website. Dewey/Hayek conference papers! These are fresh off the keyboard and most of them have the word "draft" plastered all over them, so don't tell anybody I sent you over there. But there are some nuggets. It's interesting to see these people interpret Dewey. You can tell that many of them don't really want to read too much of him and so try to get away with the usual generalities and authoritative interpretations. One example is the piece by Dupuy, called Intersubjectivity and Embodiment, which in general I liked very much and which isn't really about Dewey (but does contain a provocative hint about a comparison between Dewey and Bourdieu which I would love to see carried out). In the end Dupuy ends up relying on a one-paragraph summary of Dewey's views on truth in the form of "epistemic democracy" as described by, get this, Posner! Needless to say Dewey's views don't look so flattering through this lens. The paper is really good though and I don't want to give anyone too negative of an impression. In fact I'll try to review it tomorrow.

2003-08-01T09:54:00.000-05:00

I am reading Kang's book from 1976 (the year of my birth) entitled _G.H. Mead's Concept of Rationality: A Study of the Use of Symbols and Other Implements_. It's part of the "Approaches to Semiotics" series edited by Thomas Sebeok and I am getting a great deal out of it. In this ambitious study Kang interprets Mead's entire corpus through the lens of the concept of rationality, clearly a central concern of Mead's but not one which I had thus far considered as THE central concept of his work. Kang does not discuss the application of Mead's ideas to economic theory but drops a number of hints, and the preponderance of institutional terminology and the implemental nature of rationality itself make the possibilities pretty clear. Which is why I am so amazed that Mead's work has almost completely escaped notice by the institutionalists. I'm not just talking about social psychology either. I'm talking about the nature of institutions and technology.

so sayeth Kang:

"Insofar as an implemental process is an institution, it is (or has been) a method. And insofar as an implemental process is a method (and insofar as its situations recur), it can be diffused and institutionalized. On the other hand, certain institutions remain actively conserved in a society in spite of the fact that the situations to which they are functional have disappeared. In a perspective of new situations, these institutions are no longer methodic, but obsolete; they are museum pieces at best, if they are not obstacles to introduction of new methods."

I think that the problem is that the institutionalists want to contrast institutions and technology, with the former relegated to irrationality. I hope I am oversimplifying here but in my readings ot the institutional literature this is the impression I have gotten. I need to think about it some more.

2003-07-31T09:24:00.000-05:00

Here is a first-rate article on the analysis of talent called Smart People or Smart Contexts? Cognition, Ability, and Talent Development in an Age of Situated Approaches to Knowing and Learning by Barab and Plucker at Indiana. From the abstract: "The purpose of this article is to support a concept of ability and talent development that is theoretically grounded in 5 distinct, yet interrelated, notions: ecological psychology, situated cognition, distributed cognition, activity theory, and legitimate peripheral participation." See also Barab and Kirshner's Guest Editor's Introduction: Rethinking Methodology in the Learning Sciences in the special issue of THE JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES, 10(1&2) containing this article and others.

One more snippet to whet your appetite:

The goal of these researchers, educators, and designers moves beyond offering explanations of, and onto designing interventions for. In fact, and consistent with pragmatists such as Dewey, Pierce, and James, to some degree it is the latter functional constraint that constitutes what is a useful explanation of.

2003-07-30T09:28:00.000-05:00

Anybody else fascinated by the practice of name dropping? Are you so fascinated, Phil Agre? I know Bruno Latour is.

2003-07-29T09:42:00.000-05:00

Tentative formulation of the difference between science and technology:

Technical communities enable the activity of other communities without requiring them to manipulate the symbol language used in reasoning about the activities in isolation from them. Scientific communities do not so enable others. That is, they do require that others manipulate an isolated symbol language in order to be further enabled.

The tricky part is the "enablement." It probably has something to do with Dewey's notion of isomorphism, whereby a single set of operations establishes a mapping between the relationships (or was it relations?) of two different domains.

2003-07-28T12:13:00.000-05:00

I've been working through Peirce lately and it's a strange sensation (dislaimer: these are just impressions. don't take me too seriously). I think Bentley's assessment that Peirce was constrained by the prevailing language of his day is accurate. There is too much mentalistic baggage in the terminology he employs. But besides that, Peirce's system is a strange mix of brilliant insights and shocking naivete. The end result is that reading peirce is like digging diamonds out of a septic tank. It is a process that can make you rich, but you have to make sure to clean yourself off afterwards.

Here is an example of the brilliant Peirce:

"That there are gems at the bottom of the sea, flowers in the untravelled desert, etc., are propositions which, like that about a diamond being hard when it is not pressed, concern much more the arrangement of our language than they do the meaning of our ideas." [Mead, by the way, makes the same point in his brilliant carus lectures, Chapter I: The Present as the Locus of Reality ]

And here he displays his naive bitterness:

"If we endeavor to form our conceptions upon history and life, we remark three classes of men. The first consists of those for whom the chief thing is the qualities of feelings. These men create art. The second consists of the practical men, who carry on the business of the world. They respect nothing but power, and respect power only so far as it [is] exercised. The third class consists of men to whom nothing seems great but reason. If force interests them, it is not in its exertion, but in that it has a reason and a law."

Peirce's schizophrenia regarding the practical is truly baffling to me.

2003-07-25T09:52:00.000-05:00

John Dewey was exploring the relationship between technology and law 80 years before the important work of Lawrence Lessig, and at a deeper level. Observe:

"A rule of law, although it may be laid down because of a special act as its occasion, is formulated in view of an indefinite variety of other possible acts. It is necessarily a generalization; for it is generic as to the predictable consequences of a class of facts. If the incidents of a particular occasion exercise undue influence upon the content of a rule of law, it will soon be overruled, either explicitly or by neglect." (LW.2.271)

Now let me translate the above into hacker speak:

In releasing a class library, the developer should ensure the general nature of the provided interface. The library should be useful to the developer; but it should not only be applicable to her particular situation, but instead be formulated in view of an indefinite variety of other possible applications. If the library is too specific to the developer's needs it will remain unused; unused functionality should be cut from the distribution.

(by the way, I'm looking for a case-by-case but also theoretical introduction to the process of legal reasoning and the evolution of the law. I will probably be checking out commons' Legal foundations of capitalism soon but if anybody has other recommendations, especially from a practical-political-pragmatist-philosophical point of view I'd love to hear them).

2003-07-24T09:40:00.000-05:00

Did you know that in 1926 Dewey wrote an article called Corporate Personality (available in the later works volume 2 along with his key political work _The Public and its Problems_) which was published in the Yale Law Review and which swept away a bunch of tired debates about the "real" or "fictional" status of the personhood attributed to corporations? This article is amazing, mostly because you can see how very tangential it is to the core of Dewey's life pursuits. It's as if he said "well, I'm not doing anything this weekend and these lawyers are awfully confused. So I'll polish off the old pragmatic method and give 'em a hand." Is this article the best short introduction to Dewey's philosophy? Maybe for certain people. Whatever, just read it.

Oh, for a little more on the Dewey-legal-institutional-economic theory nexus, I hiiiiiiiighly recommend Institutional Economics at Columbia University.

2003-07-23T11:01:00.000-05:00

I have been going through the Dewey-Bentley correspondence and it's a lot of fun. Did you know Bentley referred to his life's pursuit as a "generalized economic theory?" (53) That tingles!

Sidney Ratner et al., eds., John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley: A Philosophical Correspondence, 1932-1951 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1964).

2003-07-22T12:46:00.000-05:00

Ok here it is, the long awaited list of Lyn's favorite thinkers as of lunch time on July 22, 2003:

1) John Dewey
2) George Herbert Mead
3) Pierre Bourdieu
4) Douglas Browning
5) Erving Goffman

You are probably regarding this list with a strange mix of horror and fascination. You are also standing on the back of your chair, fist in the air, shouting "Where is Peirce!? Where is Peirce, you swine?!" I can only say that I'm working on it. To tell you the truth I haven't read that much Peirce. I just got the Buchler volume (philosophical writings) in the mail though via the amazon.com used booksellers program which is great, and I'm going to give it a good look very soon.

In fact I am just about to put on a little James Brown and browse some Peirce for the remainder of my lunch period.

2003-07-21T17:38:00.000-05:00

I'm sure both of you have been wondering what I think of last year's watershed event in Deweyan logic. I am of course speaking of the publication of "The Yellow Feast," otherwise known as Dewey's Logical Theory: New Studies and Interpretations. Truly an exciting testament to the importance and vitality of Deweyan logic. (Quick confession: I have no idea where my copy is. At my parents' house? Maybe knocking around Mexico on a public bus? I already checked under the bed and in the bathroom so it's definitely not at my place. Anyway back to the volume.) It will not surprise either of you to learn that my favorite article is by Douglas Browning. In fact, this one article (plus the one on dewey and ortega on the starting point) was responsible for the rather embarrassingly Bacchanalian Browning Binge on which I am currently embarked (picked up three more articles this weekend), and for the life-sized cardboard dummy with Browning's picture pasted on the facial region which I carry around in the trunk of my car and insist be seated across from me at all meals and public functions. Ok now I'm really going to discuss the article. Basically it is an application of Dewey's logic to Dewey's logic and it is awesome. Trust me, Browning is not just playing the "I can be more meta than you" game here. He is outlining the methodological precepts that guided Dewey's work on logical theory. Browning does a great job of distinguishing aspects of subject matter from the theory that is meant to apply to them and warns against various forms of the philosopher's fallacy. Dammit, I need the article in front of me to do any better so I will have to leave it at that. The only teaser I will leave you with is this: what other 3rd-order inquiries remain to be carried out?

2003-07-18T10:01:00.000-05:00

Since I've been working for the past few months and have basically no responsibilities, I have been feeling pretty flush with cash. Despite the looming presence of the lean years on the horizon, I donated $20 to moveon.org and $25 to The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) I advise you to spend most of your money on food, and the rest on supporting these two organizations.

2003-07-17T12:56:00.000-05:00

Geoffrey Hodgson is a pretty well-known institutional economist. I haven't studied his work in depth but I've gleaned bits here and there, and I'm planning to delve a little deeper soon (probably into How Economics Forgot History) . There is also quite a bit about him on the web, including scattered references to Peirce. You may enjoy the following: Is Social Evolution Lamarckian or Darwinian? Also a Review of his Economics and Evolution and Hodgson's rather scathing reply, and two translations for the spanish readers out there: La Ubicuidad de los Habitos y las Reglas and El Enfoque de la Economia Institucional

2003-07-16T09:09:00.000-05:00

My tentative definition of technology is: The communication of methods of collective action.

2003-07-15T16:02:00.000-05:00

Timo Jarvilehto is one of a handful of contemporary psychologists doing research in a broadly Meadian / Deweyan vein. For the past several years he's been developing "The Theory of the Organism/Environment System." It's nice to read such solid work from someone who is obviously so well-grounded in modern-day experimental psychology (including neurophysical aspects). A number of his articles are online. Last year I read the first few parts of the TOTOES and last night I printed out part 4. It is pretty ambitious, aiming to sketch an account of the genesis of language and consciousness with reference to a common world relied on by all of us organism/environment systems. I will try to put up a review soon.

2003-07-14T09:51:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I ordered my favorite book, John Dewey's Logic: The Theory of Inquiry from amazon.com. I wish I had a list of everybody in the world who owns this book. Maybe I should make a web page for people to sign.

2003-07-11T16:23:00.000-05:00

Did you know that William James' complete Essays in Radical Empiricism is available online? No? Well then I'm happy to have helped.

2003-07-09T11:45:00.000-05:00

I would love to go to Great Barrington, MA this august 15-17. Not only could I check out the innovative Deweyan economics at the Behavioral Research Council but I could also check out some great music at the Berkshire Mountain Music Festival featuring one of my favorite bands, The Antibalas Afrobeat Orquestra and about twenty others.

2003-07-08T11:06:00.000-05:00

I just discovered a fascinating paper by Richard R. Nelson of Columbia university called Physical and Social Technologies, and Their Evolution. In it Nelson, arguing from an evolutionary view of economic change which seems to me broadly institutional, gets into some of the nitty gritty questions of technological progress. His main contention is that "physical" technologies evolve quickly and efficiently towards accepted ends, whereas "social" technologies evolve haphazardly if at all. As an example of a physical technology Nelson discusses hybrid seeds. Under social technology fall the M form of management and quality circles, both of which are organizational or management devices for improving quality. I think Nelson is tip toeing around something very important with this distinction. However, I think he has drawn the line in the wrong place. Rejection of a fixed distinction between the physical and the social (or nature and experience as Dewey would say) is one of the major hallmarks of pragmatism and one i support completely. Without going into much detail (this is a blog post after all) I find myself wondering under what kind of technology Nelson would place markets and auctions. These seem to me highly amenable to formalization and rapid kinds of technological innovation. Look at the growth, reliability, and yes, innovation, of electronic finance in the past 20 years or so. Also, look at ebay.com. Their technology has exploded, not because of any underlying "scientific base," or lack of a "social" factor, but for the reason that a consistent collective activity underlies and feeds into the various formalisms needed for coordinating said conjoint activity. This stuff is all in my essay on platforms, which I should really find a permanent home for. Send me email if you haven't read it yet. my mail is laheadle "AT" yahoo.com.

2003-07-07T14:17:00.000-05:00

This weekend I drove to Ocean City, New Jersey and back, to visit my sister and watch the pyrotechnics. During the 32 hours I spent in the car I got to know John Commons via his book The Economics of Collective Action. (Mostly thanks to Phil Agre) Sadly, the book is now out of print according to amazon. I have been amazed at the quality of the work and the number of insights from reading the book has been very exciting. The book is Commons' last, and is a summary of his approach to economic theory. Some of the highlights: Economics is based on the study of institutional practice, not derivation from logical concepts. An institution is collective action in control of individual action. The basic unit of economic theory is....the transaction! Dewey would be proud. An economic market transaction (buy/sell) contains at least 5 participants: the two lowest sellers and the two highest buyers, who compete amongst themselves, along with the presence of a future judicial actor like a judge, whose point of view is continually present as circumscribing possible actions on the part of the 4 major participants.

See also his article Institutional Economics

2003-07-03T12:02:00.000-05:00

David Hildebrand is a former student of of Douglas Browning and is now at UC Denver. He is also web-savvy and his site is recommended browsing. I haven't read everything, but he seems to enjoy Rorty bashing and calling attention to the fact that classical pragmatism is more consistent and, well, better than the neo versions. One of the papers available from there, though, is actually a continuation of the Browning article featured below on the limits of the practical in peirce. It is called Genuine Doubt and the Community in Peirce’s Theory of Inquiry. Hildebrand seems to want to reconcile Peirce and browning by offering a more sympathetic reading of peirce's "drift" away from the practical starting point of genuine doubt. Thus we can read Peirce as saying that pre-doubt reflective exploration can serve to lead to doubt, rather than simply creating it as peirce's somewhat careless language might imply. Here reflective exploration is much like any conduct: unproblematic for a while and then beset by doubt. This accords with my experience writing software. I may not doubt that a piece of code works, but i still tend to go over it in my mind and explore it. this often triggers actual doubt. However, there still remain Peirce's ominous pronunciations about the narrowly practical nature of Dewey's logical investigations. Peirce himself clearly signaled the difference between him and Dewey on this score.

2003-07-02T12:53:00.000-05:00

Russ Hunt from the Dewey list has alerted us about an ongoing discussion between Richard Prawat and James Garrison about a supposed discontinuity in Dewey's thought which Dewey underwent at the hands of Peirce in the middle of his career. The site, which requires free registration is www.tcrecord.org. the articles are currently featured on the front page but if you're reading this in the archives you'll have to search the site.

2003-07-01T10:16:00.000-05:00

The following paragraph, written by Charles Peirce in 1877, contains the germ of what 61 years later John Dewey would develop into the best philosophical book of the 20th century.

But it so happens that there exists a division among facts, such that in one class are all those which are absolutely essential as guiding principles, while in the others are all which have any other interest as objects of research. This division is between those which are necessarily taken for granted in asking why a certain conclusion is thought to follow from certain premisses, and those which are not implied in such a question. A moment's thought will show that a variety of facts are already assumed when the logical question is first asked. It is implied, for instance, that there are such states of mind as doubt and belief -- that a passage from one to the other is possible, the object of thought remaining the same, and that this transition is subject to some rules by which all minds are alike bound. As these are facts which we must already know before we can have any clear conception of reasoning at all, it cannot be supposed to be any longer of much interest to inquire into their truth or falsity. On the other hand, it is easy to believe that those rules of reasoning which are deduced from the very idea of the process are the ones which are the most essential; and, indeed, that so long as it conforms to these it will, at least, not lead to false conclusions from true premisses. In point of fact, the importance of what may be deduced from the assumptions involved in the logical question turns out to be greater than might be supposed, and this for reasons which it is difficult to exhibit at the outset. The only one which I shall here mention is, that conceptions which are really products of logical reflection, without being readily seen to be so, mingle with our ordinary thoughts, and are frequently the causes of great confusion. This is the case, for example, with the conception of quality. A quality, as such, is never an object of observation. We can see that a thing is blue or green, but the quality of being blue and the quality of being green are not things which we see; they are products of logical reflections. The truth is, that common-sense, or thought as it first emerges above the level of the narrowly practical, is deeply imbued with that bad logical quality to which the epithet metaphysical is commonly applied; and nothing can clear it up but a severe course of logic.

Now compare Dewey's more careful formulation. Note the explicit rejection of a psychological interpretation and the lack of references to "states of mind."

Belief may be so understood as to be a fitting designation for the outcome of inquiry. Doubt is uneasy; it is tension that finds expression and outlet in the processes of inquiry. Inquiry terminates in reaching that which is settled. This settled condition is a demarcating characteristic of genuine belief. In so far, belief is an appropriate name for the end of inquiry. But belief is a "double-barreled" word. It is used objectively to name what is believed. In this sense, the outcome of inquiry is a settled objective state of affairs, so settled that we are ready to act upon it, overtly or in imagination. Belief here names the settled condition of objective subject-matter, together with readiness to act in a give way when, if and as, that subject-matter is present in existence. But in popular usage, belief also means a personal matter; something that some human being entertains or holds; a position, which under the influence of psychology, is converted into the notion that belief is merely a mental or psychical state. Associations from this signification of the word belief are likely to creep in when it is said that the end of inquiry is settled belief. The objective meaning of subject-matter as that is settled through inquiry is then dimmed or even shut out. The ambiguity of the word thus renders its use inadvisable for the purpose in hand.

The clearest of all formulations of this matter is to be found in the work of the metaphysical texan Douglas Browning. See yesterday's post for one reference. Another is "Designation, Characterization, and Theory in Dewey's Logic," chapter in Dewey's Logical Theory: New Studies and Interpretations, edited by F. Thomas Burke, Robert B. Talisse and D. Micah Hester, Vanderbilt University Press, 2001. Also see his book _Ontology and the Practical Arena_.

Peirce was the path breaker, but he later strayed from the path. Dewey widened the path into a highway. It's time to break out the semi trucks and winnebagos.

2003-06-30T11:00:00.000-05:00

My brother has a baseball blog which is awesome.

2003-06-30T10:53:00.000-05:00

Ok, you are going to want to check this one out: Douglas Browning, "The Limits of the Practical in Peirce's View of Philosophical Inquiry," in From Time and Chance to Consciousness, Edward C Moore and Richard S Robin, eds. Berg Publishers, 1994. I can't decide whether to dub Browning "The scourge of the question begger" or "The smartest living person." Whatever, he's deep and he writes like liquid nitrogen. He likes to hold people accountable for the levels to which their theoretical terms are meant to apply and exemplifies this regimentation in his own scholarship. (aside: it is almost criminal how fast I can type the word consciousness. Check this out: consciousness. I mean, damn!)

In this particular article browning laments Peirce's drifting away from the doubt-belief continuum of inquiry which Dewey would later champion in his Logic. (the best philosophical book of the 20th century ) Browning defends the earlier Peirce of The Fixation of Belief against the later critical commonsensician. "I take it that Peirce had a better idea of what he was doing in those articles when he wrote them than he did twenty-five years later." Browning's work is rigor incarnate and serves as a model for anyone wanting to construct a responsible ontology founded in agency.

Unfortunately the same volume contains another article by P.R. Masani which dismisses Dewey in a revoltingly backhanded way. I am thinking of reading and then panning it, but i probably won't, because pragmatism is about the love.

2003-06-26T10:16:00.000-05:00

Joy! Oh, Joy! Knowing and the Known is available on line! For those of you not yet in the Know, this was Dewey's last book, written when he was 90 in collaboration with Arthur "the excoriator" Bentley. In this book Dewey and Bentley lay into the positivists for their positively unwarranted positing of the realms of " (1) men; (2) things; (3) an intervening interpretative activity, product, or medium-- linguistic, symbolic, mental, rational, logical, or other--such as language, sign, sentence, proposition, meaning, truth, or thought." In opposition Dewey and Bentley propose the transactional viewpoint which describes the evolution of Fact as correlated knowings and known in "indissoluble union." A mind-blowing book and finally availabe electronically thanks to the behavioral research council and especially its director, Elias Khalil

2003-06-24T15:10:00.000-05:00

Last night I read a great explanation of "Peirce's Triadic Theory of Signs" in an article of the same name by my friend John Overton (forthcoming in the journal Semiotica). I felt a kind of breakthrough in my understanding of Peirce thanks to the clarity and power of the diagrams used in the article, and its emphasis on the fact that A THIRD IS ALSO A FIRST. Now I understand the following passage, for example:

The triadic relation is genuine, that is its three members are bound together by it in a way that does not consist in any complexus of dyadic relations. That is the reason the Interpretant, or Third, cannot stand in a mere dyadic relation to the Object, but must stand in such a relation to it as the Representamen itself does. Nor can the triadic relation in which the Third stands be merely similar to that in which the First stands, for this would make the relation of the Third to the First a degenerate Secondness merely. The Third must indeed stand in such a relation, and thus must be capable of determining a Third of its own; but besides that, it must have a second triadic relation in which the Representamen, or rather the relation thereof to its Object, shall be its own (the Third's) Object, and must be capable of determining a Third to this relation. All this must equally be true of the Third's Thirds and so on endlessly; and this, and more, is involved in the familiar idea of a Sign; and as the term Representamen is here used, nothing more is implied. A Sign is a Representamen with a mental Interpretant. Possibly there may be Representamens that are not Signs. Thus, if a sunflower, in turning towards the sun, becomes by that very act fully capable, without further condition, of reproducing a sunflower which turns in precisely corresponding ways toward the sun, and of doing so with the same reproductive power, the sunflower would become a Representamen of the sun.

2003-06-23T15:04:00.000-05:00

This weekend I read "The Myth of Frozen Passage: The Status of Becoming in the Physical World," by Milič Čapek in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume II, which defends a broadly heraclitean interpretation of relativity physics. It is based on an interesting 5-part distinction with which I was not familiar before: 1) the simultaneity of isotopic events (events occurring at the same place) 2) the succession of isotopic events 3) the simultaneity of heterotopic events (events occurring at different places) 4) the sucession of heterotopic events which are causally related and 5) the succession of events which are not causally related. Good stuff if you're interested in the philosophy of time, especially if you're looking for ammunition against the spatializers. See also this syllabus on the philosophy of space and time. I'm also planning to look at Capek's book, _The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics_.

2003-06-19T13:01:00.000-05:00

Here is my rejoinder to James Stieb.

2003-06-19T09:54:00.000-05:00

Today I took public issue with the work of Larry Hickman, an influential Dewey scholar and philosopher of technology. In a note to the Dewey list entitled On the Cognitive in Hickman's Dewey, I argue that an important piece of Hickman's theory of technology remains unsupported by textual reference to Dewey's corpus, despite Hickman's attempt at providing such support. In particular, I claim that Hickman takes Dewey out of context and attributes to him a claim which Dewey was attributing to a foreign and adversarial tradition. [ Update -- the relevant chapter of Hickman's book is actually online. See page 21 for the contested citation. ] [ Update2 --- It's heating up already; James Stieb has sent a rebuttal to which I will try to respond tomorrow. ]

2003-06-18T10:52:00.000-05:00

I meant to post a summary of the rest of Hamilton's book today, but unfortunately I fell asleep shortly after getting home last night and slept for 12 hours. So here are some links to an interesting and fully online journal called Economic Sociology, (the current issue treats bourdieu's thought) and an absolutely superp bibliography of The history of economic thought which you should print out and carry with you at all times.

2003-06-17T09:53:00.000-05:00

The current issue of one of my favorite Journals, The Journal of economic issues, which is the main organ of original institutional economics, is dedicated to the 50th anniversary of David Hamilton's classic text Evolutionary Economics: A Study of Change in Economic Thought. I picked the book up this weekend and read most of it last night. Yes, it's that small! Only 120 tiny pages. It is also clear and profound. I found it to be a great perspective on the core of both (neo)classical and institutionalist thought.

A key contention of the book is that classical economics, or classicism, is based on a newtonian view of the world consisting of fixed entities reacting to each other through the "force" of self interest. Institutional thought, on the other hand, comes from a darwinian perspective, not in the vulgar form of "survival of the fittest," but rather with an emphasis on the fact that structure and form (even logical form) are the result of past activity and creative advance, not the relentless elaboration of some predetermined set of rules and configurations (the most recent version of this deterministic theory seems to be Wolfram's very popular A New Kind of Science. ) Change in classicism comes from outside the economic system and causes a disturbance in equilibrium, which must then be regained. Change in institutionalist thought is inherent in the economic system.

One chapter of the book is devoted to psychological foundations. Classicism rests on hedonistic foundations, which assert the dominance of pleasure and pain calculations in decisions made by "rational" actors. Such psychology is universalized and applied as self-evidently and ahistorically applicable to all human societies. Institutional psychology, on the other hand, is (social) behavioristic. Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct is foundational to the movement. Unfortunately though, Mead is not discussed by Hamilton (where are the Meadian institutionalists?) and James seems to be dismissed too easily as an 'instinctivist.' Nevertheless, the basics of social behaviorism are intimated. In contrast to classicism, which sees the agent as primarily reactive to sensations of pain and pleasure, behaviorism sees the agent as primarily active. Sensations accompany actions but do not determine or cause them. Also, this action is responsive to and interpreted by the cultural nexus in which the agent is situated. This amounts to a revolutionary difference in psychological foundations.

The last chapter for today is the one on Change and social organization. The classicists viewed their surrounding context as the necessary result of the fixed laws of nature. Primitive societies were destined to evolve into capitalist ones. Institutionalists, again, reversed this dynamic. Norms and regulations are seen by them to be the result of a specific, historically determined social context. In my opinion the most interesting feature of institutional thought arises here, in the theorizing of economic progress as an interplay between institutional aspects and technological aspects. institutional or ceremonial aspects are static and serve to slow down advances by appeal to sacred tradition and, basically, magical powers. (veblen deliciously turns the tools of anthropology on the study of his own culture) Technology serves to disrupt institutions by combination of existing tools into new ones. thus institutions and technology react upon each other, much like Mead's "I" and "Me" dynamic.

Reading this book has given me a new resolve to explore the pioneering work of Thorstein Veblen. I urge others to do the same. See also Geoffrey Hodgson's online version of an article from this same journal issue entitled Darwinism and Institutional Economics

2003-06-16T09:36:00.000-05:00

This weekend I took a trip to the Joseph Regenstein Library in Hyde Park, and boy am I glad I did. Chasing a reference from Joas' book on Mead, I took home the article "Whitehead's influence on the Thought of G.H. Mead" by Gary A. Cook , and found it to be one of the most stimulating articles I've read all year. Joas sings high praise of Cook's work and now I can see why (I've got to find his dissertation). The article weaves Mead's fragmented writings into the systematic whole that they truly are, and by pointing out the many differences between Mead and Whitehead's projects, Cook leaves the reader with a deep and consistent understanding of the direction in which Mead saw his work heading at the end of his life (and which it is up to us to continue). One of the primary differences (at least with regard to whitehead's early writings on nature and relativity) is that whitehead banished the realm of mind from his investigations, while Mead, armed with an original social theory of Mind he had spent 25 years developing, sought to include mind within nature, in a fully observable way. Thus, cook tells us that "the fundamental conceptions of physical science are idealizations corresponding to patterns which a suitable analysis can extract from the concrete passage of nature presented to sense awareness...Mead...is in total agreement with this thesis... But in Mead's work [we find] a kind of inquiry of which we find no hint in Whitehead's philosophy of nature. For Mead is mainly concerned to relate the previously mentioned "enduring patterns" and the process of their extraction from passage to an analysis of conduct. Thus we find him asknig: What are the mechanisms of behavior which give rise in experience to such items as moments, consentient sets, timeless space, and abstract time? And what functions do these perform in the economy of action?"

I am repeatedly stunned by how well and how productively Mead's metaphysics of time hangs together with his functional social psychology. The glue binding the two together is of course his notion of the act or the event, but some of the details, while crucial, remain obscure in Mead's writings due to his somewhat "byzantine" prose, as my friend Peter Vlach has described it. In this article the details are clearly filled in by someone with a mastery of Mead's entire corpus. It is an excellent piece and should be read by anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Mead's pathbreaking investigations into the nature of our evolving reality.

2003-06-13T13:27:00.000-05:00

Link of the month! Check out the recent dissertation of political theorist Jeffrey Alan Johnson entitled Democratic DNA: Modernity, Pragmatism, and the Social Challenges of Human Genomics. It is an examination of politics and technology from a pragmatist standpoint (the first one I have seen with these exact emphases). Especially interesting is his attempt to define technology as "semiotic action" and his proposed model of democratic technology at both inter and intranational levels. I have only just discovered this work, so I can't comment too much more on it. Expect a more detailed review on monday. [ update -- I read two chapters this weekend and can only express a general kind of support for Johnson's project. The particulars of his analysis of technology didn't really resonate with me. I'm too busy surveying to work up a detailed criticism right now though]

2003-06-11T17:00:00.000-05:00

Here's one by some swedish organization theorists, Braf and Goldkul, which is exciting in various respects. It's called The Significance of Organizational Capability: The Interplay of Knowledge, Communication and Technology.

I enjoyed the paper because it is broadly against theories of knowledge-as-codified-content-or-textual-stuff, emphasizing instead knowledge for action. It also treats the notion of capability as fundamental, as is my own wont. My preferences differ from the authors, however, in that I would deemphasize personal or subjective knowledge (which they emphasize); I do not regard technology in terms of artifacts (but rather collective processes or platforms), and I am reluctant to separate communication and technology into separate compartments. Thought-provoking stuff nonetheless.

2003-06-11T09:30:00.000-05:00

Glen Pate has placed excerpts on his website of John Dewey's famous introduction to Essays in experimental logic. This is a Great overview of Dewey's logical thought for people who don't want to slog through hundreds of pages of technical philosophy. If you like this link, Glen has some other excerpts including selections from my favorite Dewey works, Experience and Nature; and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry at his site John Dewey in Hamburg, Germany

2003-06-10T15:09:00.000-05:00

Here is a useful syllabus for a course on the history of economic thought by a professor dyer at northeastern. an impressive range of thinkers is surveyed including Peirce, Dewey, Fromm, Robinson, and several semioticians. I'm off to the library!

2003-06-06T10:58:00.000-05:00

I need a name for the (still far too vague) constellation of research interests that motivates me to post on this site. Since my research is a personal affair, and the notion of sign seems broad enough to cover everything, I will refer to my evolving activity as the Lsign process (L is for Lyn), and in particular cases will refer to Lsigns.

Within a couple of years I will need a dissertation topic. Ideally it will consist of equal parts (information?) technology, pragmatist philosophy, social/political theory, and empirical research. I am by now fairly confident of my theoretical leanings and have sketched a theory of technological platforms which I would like to use as a stepping stone in further work. I can "feel it" when a theorist and I are in sync. But as for empirical topics, my course is far from clear.

To that end I am planning a series of posts considering the menu of empirical topics that are out there for someone with my theoretical leanings and practical trajectory. For now I want to fill in a few of the desirable qualities such a topic should possess. First of all, I want to examine a process of collective activity, or an interlocking set of such processes. The mechanics of such research remain to be fully worked out, but it is here that I have drawn heavily on the pragmatists (especially Dewey/Bentley and Mead). Something like this seems to be what these folks meant by "mind." Importantly, such a process must be transparent, which is what lies at the heart of the behaviorist movement (which i don't favor but has some heroic figures struggling to reform it from within). Behaviorists tend to use the word "observable" but I think I prefer "transparent." So transparency is a major theme.

But what does transparency mean in my context? I've been thinking along the lines of C Wright Mills here: check out his amazing article "Situated Actions and vocabularies of motive." written in the 30's. It's basically a denial of the freudian claim that motives are internal causes of action, suggesting instead that motives are linguistic actions (performatives) which enable and coordinate _interaction_. Given my further expectation that collective processes require symbolic representations of the procedures they use to make decisions, transparency would be something like the correspondence between a motive proffered for an action and the available symbolic record of the procedures used to make analogous past decisions. Transparency is a relationship between a motive for present action and a past of precedent-setting previous actions. Any contradiction between the two would call for some kind of reconstruction, like an apology or distinction between the two cases for example.

2003-06-04T16:07:00.000-05:00

Democratic and feminist theorist Carole Pateman has a web page with a couple of online papers. I am enjoying her discussion of the basic income grant proposal which she advocates. The idea is to consider such a basic income, which would unconditionally provide all citizens with a comfortable if modest living, as a fundamental right due all citizens in a democracy. She compares such a grant to the right of suffrage, which was once restricted to white male property owners and has been progerssively expanded to enfranchise others. I also highly recommend her now classic account of workplace democracy in Participation and Democratic Theory. Here is an interesting list at amazon of reading material in radical democracy. Echoes of Dewey's article "Democracy is Radical."

2003-05-29T16:09:00.000-05:00

Jeremy Roschelle is working in the tradition of Computer Situated Cooperative Learning. Here is an article of his called What Should Collaborative Technology Be? A Perspective From Dewey and Situated Learning. One important point is his distinction between a "collaborative technology" and a "technological setting for collaboration."

2003-05-28T15:20:00.000-05:00

Here is a chapter of cognition theorist Jean Lave's forthcoming book (in rough form), which makes progress towards understanding the everyday,not in epistemological terms, nor as a zone of life set apart from "higher" zones like philosophy or science, but rather as the lived fabric of social existence. It is shot through with political ramifications and contains an informative dissection of relevant work by Bourdieu, Shapin, and De Certeau. Part of the U of Michigan School of Information's Presentations recently organized by the Interdisciplinary Committee on Organizational Studies.

2003-05-27T13:39:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the delay in posting; I've been at a funeral in florida. Here is an interesting paper by David Hung called "Situated Cognition and Problem-Based Learning: Implications for Learning and Instruction with Technology." Which draws together a number of relevant fields around the subject of education technology. Contains a useful synthesis of many works of Dewey, Wittgenstein, Rorty, Vygotsky, Lave, Polanyi and others.

2003-05-20T15:12:00.000-05:00

Ever heard of sociocybernetics? Also interesting is this edited book, Informational Societies.

2003-05-16T10:39:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting paper by Elihu M Gerson called DIFFERENT PARTS FOR DIFFERENT SMARTS: PARTONOMIES AND THE ORGANIZATION OF WORK, which is an investigation into coordination among disparate research communities centered around the notion of "common information spaces." Oddly, although Gerson cites Chicago school sociology and classical pragmatism, as well as Latourian technoscience studies, he surprisingly does not mention the work of Star and Bowker, who are only a few hours down the road in San Diego and who have been working this terrain for years, especially in the areas of Border Objects (which to me sound a lot like the "coordination mechanisms" discussed in the paper) and Classification systems. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the paper and am looking forward to chasing down some of the references.

2003-05-14T16:09:00.000-05:00

The Social Sciences Consortium of the University of Missouri, Kansas City is currently conducting a pragmatism seminar which is being recorded and made available online as a series of audio recordings. The material ranges widely over topics in philosophy, economics, psychology and social theory.

2003-05-13T15:27:00.000-05:00

Three papers I haven't read yet (sorry): Persons, Identities and Social Interaction which is a semiotic investigation of identity (i think), Whitehead and Emergence Theories of Mind, and Does a Robot Have an Umwelt?

2003-05-12T14:21:00.000-05:00

Two great online papers by Hilary Putnam: An insightful discussion of Cornell West's inspiring work, _The American Evasion of Philosophy_ (which contains the interesting remark that Roberto Unger has recently come to reevaluate and appreciate Dewey's contribution to an experimental institutionalism very much in Unger's vein) and a paper called Dewey's Central Insight which I haven't finished but which plumbs the depths of Dewey's epistemology as well as ethics and attempts to thread the two together (as Dewey explicitly did in _The Quest for Certainty_).

2003-05-09T15:17:00.000-05:00

Got two books from amazon yesterday: Hans Joas' The Genesis of Values and Pierre Bourdieu's Pascalian Meditations. I also checked out Axel Honneth's The Struggle for recognition (from my local public library!), which has an insightful discussion of Mead and Hegel as related to Honneth's systematic 'grammar of moral conflict.'

2003-05-08T10:01:00.000-05:00

Today is a good day because I discovered the work of Stephen Gourlay from Kingston University in the UK. He is working on issues in the foundations of knowledge management and relies heavily on the work of Dewey and Bentley. A great paper critiquing the field's conception of knowledge along behavioral/transactional lines and linking up with various interesting traditions (like activity theory and distributed cognition, both of which my department is strong in) can be found here.This paper also led me to the work of William J Clancey, a computer scientist working on situated cognition. Another of Gourlay's contributions is this paper, which assimilates Polanyi's celebrated thesis of "tacit knowledge" to a framework based on Knowing and the Known. Tasty!

2003-05-07T10:05:00.000-05:00

Spurred on by John Deely's fantastic online paper called The Impact of Semiotics on Philosophy (one of the Helsinki Papers, ) I discovered this link (part of a larger investigation) regarding the Dewey-Bentley-Morris conflict of the late 1940's, a squabble which has always interested me. Apparently Dewey (and by extension I assume Bentley) misinterpreted both Peirce and Morris. Hard to take for a true believer! Another interesting link which I haven't had time to explore is Kalevi Kull's Thomas A Sebeok and Biology: Building Biosemiotics.

2003-05-06T09:38:00.000-05:00

Outstanding site alert: Dan Palmer's Psychology Page. See especially his favorite scholars page which contains hours of satisfying surfing and linking. I want to highlight in particular his link to Timo jarvileto, containing online papers about, among other things, his "Theory of the Organism-Environment System," which is like a modern, empirically up-to-date version (vindication) of Mead's thesis. Also on Dan's site is a mammoth Arthur Bentley Page, overflowing with this neglected scholar's acerbic commentary. Dan's evolving dissertation is also well worth a look.

2003-05-05T09:39:00.000-05:00

More great posts to the Dewey list about the connection to Bourdieu: First, Guillaume Garreta informs us of the several places Dewey is mentioned in the pascalian meditations, including the statement that "I have always attempted to...rely on the analyses...done by ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism." Clearly he was much better versed in Austin than the pragmatists though. And as if that weren't enough detective work for the list, Harold Orbach has come through once again, uncovering a reference by bourdieu to, of all things, the Logic! Further, he seems to have tracked down the transmitter of this arcane corner of Deweydom, in the person of Abraham Kaplan and his book The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for the Behavioral Sciences, which has just gone on my wish list. Many thanks to Harold and Guillaume.

2003-05-02T10:23:00.000-05:00

Interesting discussion on the Mead list about whether Mead held a triadic theory of meaning. Robert Throop has weighed in with a pointer to "The best discussion of the triadic question in Mead" that he has found. It is in Lewis and Smith's American Sociology and Pragmatism: Mead, Chicago Sociology, and Symbolic Interaction

2003-05-02T09:43:00.000-05:00

There is an interview with an exciting contemporary pragmatist, Hans Joas, called Action is the Way in Which Human Beings Exist in the World. Joas is one of my favorite contemporary thinkers, and the author of G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought, which is a remarkably far-reaching analysis of Mead's contemporary relevance. Joas' The Creativity of Action is great too. He is currently at my alma mater, the university of chicago, as part of the committee on social thought. I'm looking forward to exploring his work some more.

2003-05-01T14:12:00.000-05:00

There are several interesting papers linked to a page discussing old "programmes" of the Helsinki Metaphisical club. I found this link chasing a reference provided to the Mead list by Javier A Carnicer. Scroll down the page for pdf links. Especially interesting is the paper about emergence whose only citation of Mead is to the philosophy of the present and whose dewey cites are the quest for certainty and knowing and the known. good signs, both.

2003-05-01T12:39:00.000-05:00

I've admired Pierre Bourdieu's work for a while now, and today David Capes (via the Dewey List), informed me that Bourdieu actually cites Dewey's influence directly in his Pascalian Meditations. Joy!

[Oops, turns out there was no influence. Bourdieu does ackowledge a set of "striking affinities and convergences" though. Thanks to Harold Orbach for the clarification]

2003-05-01T09:44:00.000-05:00

I highly recommend Christopher Ansell's online book chapter on "Pragmatism and Organization."
He does a great job of synthesizing the pragmatist movement with various strands in organization theory. His vision is a pragmatism which serves as foundation for broader excursions in social and political theory. I hope to do work in a similar vein some day. The chapter is available from his home page. Search for "Dewey."