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Pragmatism as a philosophical method emerged in part as a reaction to the same Enlightenment excesses to which conservatism was a reaction. Common themes in the anti-foundationalist epistemologies of three philosophers illustrate this origin. The first, Charles Sanders Peirce, reacted to the Cartesian approach to philosophy. He rejected the capacities Descartes claimed for man and articulated the consequences of these incapacities. The second, John Dewey, reconstructed philosophy by turning away from the Enlightenment quest for certainty toward a view of inquiry and the knowledge claims inquiry begets that are situated, contextualized, fallible, social, and embodied. Dewey illustrates that some knowledge is not guided by formal reason, but by habit and emotion. He transformed the end of inquiry from an emphasis on truth towards warranted assertability and from a focus on certainty towards the resolution of problematic situations. The third, F.A. Hayek, taking Cartesian rationalism as a foe in common with Peirce, shows that the Cartesian criteria for the validity of claims was overly narrow and failed to understand both the permanent limitations of our epistemic capacity and the way embodied knowledge evolves socially, forming spontaneous orders whose origin is not the design of human reason.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137466839_7

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